


And Full As Much Heart.

by unfortunatesideeffects



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon magic, Canon-typical swearing, Dreamer Ronan Lynch, F/M, Historical, Jane Eyre - Freeform, M/M, Magician Adam Parrish, Quite a lot of sex, Slow Burn, Victorian, Violence, domestic abuse, falling in love whilst fighting monsters, mentions of period-typical homophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:41:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 54,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26212069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unfortunatesideeffects/pseuds/unfortunatesideeffects
Summary: Adam Parrish has spent the last decade of his life at the Aglionby School for Boys, the latter five years as a teacher. At twenty-two, feet restless and mind yearning for more, he takes a position at The Barnes, a sprawling estate in Galway, as lush and green as the woods where he spent his childhood. His pupil is strange and her father, when finally he appears, stranger.Adam has been poor and obscure all his life; he had hoped, with time, that he might resolve the first of these difficulties at least. What he had not planned for was the possibility of happiness, or its potential costs.~No prior reading ofJane Eyrenecessary.This fic is COMPLETE; I'll be posting two chapters a week until it's all uploaded.
Relationships: Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 241
Kudos: 272





	1. Prologue.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A wild flight, an unexpected ending.
> 
> _Tonight something had shifted. Adam had felt it in the small hairs on his arms and neck, which had pricked up like a fox’s ears to wake him at the first tread of feet on the stairs. They were heavy feet, weighed down with years of disappointed hopes and failed chances, and more than anything else with the rage that those things had born._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for canon-typical domestic and child abuse in this chapter.
> 
> ~
> 
> This is not a faithful retelling.
> 
> First thing: this story is finished! I’m only trying to post it in chapters because I am attempting restraint like a real, adult human being. We’ll see how that goes.
> 
> Second: it’s long. Like…75,000 words? I had a good few weeks.
> 
> Third: In case you are not familiar with Jane Eyre (you certainly don’t need to be) it has a few key points in common with our Raven boys, just enough that I took them and ran for miles:  
> \- A strange, rich, grumpy man living in self-imposed exile in the country  
> \- An orphan child with a language barrier, acquired under less-than-salubrious circumstances  
> \- A poor, clever, wilful, independent, resourceful (also orphaned, literally or functionally) child who grows up to be a poor, clever, wilful, independent, resourceful and academically accomplished adult  
> \- An expansive but physically isolated location  
> \- A few Big Secrets
> 
> I hope you enjoy this. I had a lot of fun writing it. It hasn’t been beta-ed, though I have edited it myself. As often happens to me, I did not write it in a straight, continuous line (do other people write linearly? Please give me tips). What this means is that, because it’s quite long, there is a possibility of continuity errors. I have done my best but if you find one, really, truly, please tell me. I do so want it to make sense.
> 
> Should I ask the gods of literature to forgive me? Too soon to tell, I suppose.
> 
> Thank you for reading.

Adam was running. It was dark and very cold, and his bare feet went _thwap-thwap-thwap_ quickly over the wet leaves, a hectic pace. Behind him was thunder, the dead crunch of branches under heavy feet, thick-wet breathing and, periodically, a bellow, as of a raging animal but modulated into terrible, terrifying words.

“ _Boy_!” the monster roared. Adam trembled. He could not fall, he must not fall. He could not be caught. Other nights he had been. Other nights, he had stayed still, as instructed, stood until knocked down, risen again until he could not stand, curled in upon himself and tried to shield the parts of him that could not be easily repaired, and it had been fine, for a certain value of fine. Which was to say, it had been survivable.

But tonight…tonight something had shifted. He had felt it in the small hairs on his arms and neck, which had pricked up like a fox’s ears to wake him at the first tread of feet on the stairs. They were heavy feet, weighed down with years of disappointed hopes and failed chances, and more than anything else with the rage that those things had born. Adam was used to their sound, the way his father threw his weight casually behind them, not bothering to disguise their leaden progress.

But tonight it was different.

For an eternal minute Adam had lain perfectly still in his narrow bed, heart beating in his throat like a songbird fresh-caught and frantically unaccustomed to its prison. It was hard to listen to his father’s progress over the drumbeat in his ears. He was trying to figure out what had changed.

 _Softness_ , his mind suggested, _No, stealth_. Was that a fractional hesitation before each footfall? A moment of careful placement, a marginally lighter tread? Why? Usually, his father made no attempt to mask his presence; in fact, Adam had seen sometimes a light in his eyes when he opened the door to find Adam cowering, huddled in a corner like an animal – _Weakling!_ His father snarled. _Changeling! Waste of space! Stand up like a man when I speak to you!_ – and knew, instinctively, that his fear was pleasurable in some way. Part of the game.

But now his father’s feet attempted stealth, and Adam felt cold grip his innards and paralyse his lungs.

 _He hopes to surprise me_ , Adam thought, _To find me asleep. To drag me from my bed. To start when I am still unconscious, before I can protect myself._ The thought of this was terrifying. It was not the fact of it as much as the desire it spoke of: a dark, premeditated thing. An intention to wound while Adam was truly defenceless. A will to commit violence unobserved.

Quickly, silently, he slipped from his narrow bed. The floor was frigid beneath his bare feet, and he reached instinctively for his short jacket where it hung on the bedpost. His fingers trembled as he slipped the window latch. There, behind him. The distinctive squeak of the third stair from the landing, and a rumble of curses, quick-bitten back. His hands shook as he pushed up the sash.

His little garret room was perched above a shed, a strange add-on behind the stables, the better to have him on hand to tend ill beasts in the night. It was an odd, narrow room, a half-stop between the first and second floor. This meant that though he usually scaled the old elm tree to reach the ground via his window, the distance was not impossible at a jump. He had done it before. In daylight, in boots and not a night-shirt, but he had done it. Perhaps, if he fell badly, his father would consider a beating unnecessary. Perhaps, if he fell _very_ badly – stumbled, for instance, and hit his head on the stone border of the flowerbed – there would be no point in beating him ever again.

Adam paused, balanced on the sill, trying to see the ground. He did not want to fall very badly. There were bushes beneath the window, he knew. It would hurt. Perhaps he could make it down the tree after all.

He heard soft-heavy footsteps in the corridor, the deep breathing of some forest beast pressed against his door. The latch rattled cautiously, almost delicately upward. Adam jumped.

He did not land too badly, but the branches cut his foot and, trying instinctively to protect it, he slipped. The twist made him gasp, buckled him for a moment at the knee before he could gather his breath back to him and limp out of the flowerbed. He stumbled forwards into moonless dark, past the shadow of the elm and off towards the lawn. It was not until he heard a roar behind him that he realised his first mistake. The grimy pallor of his night shirt and legs stood out like an albatross against the inky green of the lawn. He chanced a glance over his shoulder as his father bellowed from the window, and tried to force himself into a dragging run.

If he could make it to the trees before his father charged down the stairs, he would be safe – at least for now. The woods were dark even under a full moon, and nobody but Adam knew them well. In this moonless black even he would lose his way, but if he could just get out of sight of the house his father might abandon the chase. Even if he didn’t, the trees got thick fast and, drunk and angry and huge, surely his father would not have the patience to push much past the border?

And then he tripped on a stone and his twisted ankle buckled spectacularly beneath him, and Adam was sprawled face-first in the freezing wet grass. Behind him, he heard the gravel path crunch.

“ _Boy_!”

Adam scrabbled for purchase, shoving to get himself up, staggering onwards. He didn’t look back, there was no time. He focussed on the trees ahead, a wall of blacker shadows against the clouded sky.

 _Please_.

He could hear them rustling. His twisted foot dragged in the mud.

 _Please_ , Adam thought desperately, _Please._

He could hear boots pounding behind him, slipping, cursing, shouting. His father made no effort at cunning now. He was as loud in his fury as a wounded bull, charging towards Adam, gaining on him, gaining on him. Adam could almost feel hot breath on his neck. The trees were nearing now, branches reaching back towards him, almost within grasp, almost –

Squelching, grunting, panting, “ _You stop right now, boy, I’m going to beat you bloody_!” Adam’s fingers touched bark. He narrowly avoided a root.

“ _Don’t you go in there! Don’t you dare –_ “

But Adam did dare. He hurled himself forwards into a dark so thick and damp, so fragrant with moss and mist, that it felt like a living thing. A touching thing. Reaching out to him to draw him in as he stumbled forwards.

Nobody else knew these woods. Not the servants at the house or his parents or the folk who worked the farm. Rumours grew like weeds around them. They covered but a spare mile of ground, yet unwary strangers had been known to vanish entire, or be found months later rake thin and a little loopy, wandering the tree line. Strange plants were said to grow in them, and folks swore to sightings of brilliantly coloured birds, or white beasts, alien in the good English countryside.

But Adam…Adam loved them. As a child, barely three years old, he had toddled off in a moment of inattention, his mother shelling peas on the stoop, and not been found (or missed) ‘til five hours hence, grubby and smiling, unidentifiable leaves twined into his sandy hair. The beating he’d got had not been severe, in the greater scheme of things, but, clever even as a mite, he’d found more opportune times for later explorations. Never when he was supposed to be working, never when his parents might note his absence. Don’t muss your clothes, don’t bring anything back. Adam had bided his time, counted his hours, and spent the best of them cradled in the cool green shade of the little forest.

It was, no doubt about it, a strange place. He couldn’t really say he knew it, exactly, for it never seemed to stay exactly the same from one visit to the next. But he knew how it _felt_ , like cool water on a hot day, like a wheat-yellow field stretching on forever beneath a summer sky, like getting lost in a good book, like safety, quiet, peace. He felt at home there, and he felt protected.

He needed that protection now, desperately.

Behind him he could hear branches snapping as his father crashed blindly in after him, and he felt ill at the thought of that destruction, sick to have brought this monstrous sledge hammer of a human being into this precious, peaceful place.

The trees rustled around him and Adam felt himself, not for the first time, the focus of an alien intelligence. It was ancient and unknowable, and he just a fragile, mortal thing crouched at the centre of this great parliament of trees. They spoke in many strange voices, and he felt weak and vulnerable, a hummingbird’s worth of life, a moth’s, set against their great antiquity and strange, all-encompassing presence.

 _Hide me_ , Adam thought suddenly, _Please hide me. I’ll do anything. Don’t let him find me. Whatever I have is yours._ Adam had not believed in God in a long time. He did not know to whom he prayed or begged. He only knew that he was reaching a precipice, a certain end. His foot throbbed and caught on roots and brambles. He hauled himself onwards by catching branches, dragging himself bodily over fallen trunks. But he was very far from invincible. He was just a boy. Shivering, hurt, in nothing but a night-shirt and his well-patched jacket, in the chill of early spring, barefoot in the woods. His father was gaining on him. He could almost feel that thick, alcoholic breath on his nape.

 _Please_ , he asked the forest, _Please. You’re the only place I’ve ever been safe. Please hide me. I’ll do anything._ But there was nothing to do, and he had nothing to give, he knew he had nothing. Nothing but himself, and what was that to a forest? Around him he could feel the trees. He could sense the life in them, the myriad ways they reached out to connect with the earth, the insects, the animals, the very air itself and each other. What were his knobbly fingers compared to great branches and quivering leaves? What were mere human senses to searching roots? _I know it’s not much, but I can fix things. I’m good with my hands. And I notice things. I see things other people miss. I can be useful to you_ , he begged the trees, _You can have my hands, you can have my eyes. Just please, please. Keep me safe. Don’t let him find me._

Afterwards, nobody could say how it had happened. There’d never been rumour of a ravine in the woods. Far as anyone knew, the stream that ran through Cabeswater was shallow; clear and fast, but easy enough to ford. And yet there he was, when morning dawned, and sure as sure if he’d not broke his neck in the fall he would have drowned, for the water that carried Mr Parrish’s body out of the little forest and into the soft foothills at the edge of the estate was white and fast and deep. Must be rain in the mountains, they said, to turn the brook to rushing, to make a lethal river of a rill.

Adam, shivering and muddy and bare-legged still, his ankle blue-black and dragging, told them what had happened. Which is to say he told them how, from his bedroom window, he’d seen his father, looking ill and shaky, listing across the lawn. Seen him enter the forest and worried for him, in his unsteady state. How he’d rushed down the back stairs but been too late to catch a glimpse of him in the gloom, and had wandered himself, half-frozen and, finally, falling, lost in the dark, until morning, when he’d heard the shepherd calling and come, like the rest of them, to find his father’s sodden body broken on the rocks.

This was the first great lie of Adam’s life, and though it would not be his last, it was the one he felt least conflicted about, in part because he did not carry its burden alone. Not a one amongst the gathered crowd believed his father’s ‘illness’, nor looked at Adam’s bruises and saw naught but boyish misadventures or filial loyalty. But they nodded their heads solemnly and agreed that it was too bad, the loss of Mr Parrish, such a pity for his poor wife, and could some way be found, perchance, to do something for the boy? Poor scrap that he was, but clever, capable. Perhaps some relatives in the country, or the charity school near London. They’d put their heads together. Get up to the house with you for something warm, child, and mind, Cook, have a look at that ankle. It was too bad, really. And such a good lad, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first thing I've written for this fandom, and the first thing I've written on AO3 in a _long_ time. Not that I was prolific before.
> 
> Anyway, I'm not quite sure how it happened.
> 
> I think I read waroftheposes’s _Pride and Prejudice_ x _Raven Cycle_ AU and thought, _oh, fun_ , and then, _wait, I feel like there’s another story that might fit this pattern…_ So I just...started, and sooner or later I had 75,000 odd words, with an angsty middle and a happy ending and everything.
> 
> And so here we are, because if fleshy dreams and nightmares have a place anywhere in classic Western literature, it’s definitely amongst the Gothic fiction.
> 
> I am hoping for comments (because, really, isn't that the point of sharing a story?) and looking forward to seeing how long I can hold out before getting impatient and posting the next chapter. I give myself about four days, tops.
> 
> I'm thinking twice-weekly updates; at 24 chapters that means the whole thing should be posted by, what, late October? What do you think?


	2. I remembered that the real world was wide.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A change, a meeting, another change.
> 
> _“There you are,” she said, as though they had arranged to meet and he was late._
> 
> _“Here I am,” Adam said, warily._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who read the last chapter; and thank you particularly to those who have returned for another!
> 
> Thank you also to those who left kudos, or bookmarked, or subscribed or, best of all, left comments. You all made my day.
> 
> Title is from _Jane Eyre_

In one way, Adam’s life had been a unilateral disaster. In another, he was actually quite lucky. For most children, to lose a parent, be uprooted and packed off to live with strangers might be traumatic; for him, it marked a sharp improvement. His life divided for the first time: before school and after.

It was certainly not a romantic change. To move from the warm, wide green fields of Henrietta to Aglionby’s low panelled hallways and chill grey flags was to travel from light to ponderous gloom, from the warm animal and hay smell of his stables to Aglionby’s omnipresent chill. The rooms where the boys slept were tucked high under the eaves, and so they learnt to commune with the weather, which was to say that they sweat and froze by turns. Years of smoke licked soot up the walls of the long refectory, and the food was reliably bad.

Yet, on the other hand, it was _reliable_.

And because Adam was a good, if solitary, student, he found that he could rely on other things as well. He could rely on his teachers not to beat him, on the younger children to confide in him, the older to ignore him or even offer grudging respect. As he grew he discovered that the same talents which had so alienated him from his father – a faculty for reading and figures, an ear (albeit only one) for language – endeared him to his teachers. He had to work harder for music, and to learn the knack of sketching a thing from life, but Adam was nothing if not focused. Learn he did. That and much more besides.

He learnt to stand straight and loose, like the other boys, not hunched in and bracing for a blow. He learnt to articulate his ‘t’s and how to wrap a university accent, carefully lifted from his teachers, around his slow country drawl. He studied the classics, drilled into himself words he had never before heard pronounced. He perfected the cool, unruffled confidence of those few boys who had come from better parts of the world than he, before misfortune had tumbled them into Aglionby’s stern embrace. Adam was re-making himself in an image he had chosen. He would shed Henrietta like a snake’s skin and emerge changed and worthy.

For his skills he was granted special responsibilities and commensurate rewards. As a senior pupil he helped with the younger boys, and on graduating was offered a formal position. He stayed at Aglionby ten years in total, five as a pupil and five as a teacher until, one bright morning in May, he received a letter.

Adam had been expecting this letter, in a general way, for the past six months. _Change_ the cards had whispered to him, _choices_. A new beginning. And Adam had learned, despite his teachers’ pragmatic disdain for whimsey and nonsense of all kinds, to trust the cards.

He had not meant to become a spiritualist. Before the cards, Adam had always had what his mother had used, exhaustedly, when she paid him any mind at all, to call a ‘knack’. She could not fathom where it might have come from. Nobody in her family had had it, and his father certainly did not seem the type. But Adam had always known things. Not big things, or particularly unnerving things, but small, useful things. Known when to sleep by an expectant horse so that he could run for help when the labour turned bad. Known where to find a hole in the chicken coop before a fox could get in. Known when to duck, when he was running full-tilt though his forest. When to slip out of the kitchen before his father’s bulky shoulders filled the doorway. Not big things. Not consistently. Just small, helpful nudges that made his day-to-day life run a little more smoothly.

After his father died, after that night in the forest, something had changed.

It wasn’t obvious at first, because there had been no time. Adam was still limping when old Mr Smythe, the butler, had summoned him and explained that, in light of his quickness and promise, and the unfortunate accident with his father, the master and mistress of the house had decided to send him to school. They would sponsor Adam, he said, at a charity school some three towns away. It was a great opportunity. A chance to improve his station and make good use of his wits. He must apply himself to his studies and honour their favour with diligence and good behaviour. He was, Mr Smythe was certain, very grateful.

Something deep within Adam which he tried, with all the determination of the true survivor, to beat back, rankled at everything about this situation. _Charity_. _Grateful_. _Favour_. Adam knew objectively that all these things were true. He was poor. The charity of others was his best chance at making a life for himself that was bigger than his mother’s, his father’s, than his life might ever have been if it were not for that one, terrible night. It was indeed a great gift. He should, certainly, be grateful. And, objectively, he was. But there was a zealousness within him which he had never yet had the luxury to explore, a sharp and vital core that beat against the pragmatism of poverty and wanted only to do things _his_ way, on _his_ time, as _he_ pleased. It raged inside him, battered itself against the insides of his ribs. _Freedom_. _Independence. To be beholden to no one. For no-one to hold him back_.

But Adam was a child and, by necessity, a brutally practical one. He had bowed his head respectfully. Said ‘yes, sir’, and ‘no, sir’ and ‘thank you’ at all the right intervals. He had bundled his meagre possessions into a sack and, before dawn touched the clouds the next day, had been bundled in his turn into a carriage, between the parcels and the morning post, off to Aglionby and change.

His mother had not seemed to mind – or in fact said much of anything at all – and he was not surprised.

It was at Aglionby that Adam discovered just how very _much_ change had occurred.

Adam still had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. But now, sometimes, ahead of time, he knew why. This was, at first, very confusing. He made plausible explanations in his mind: he had overheard his Latin master talking about a problem with that horse. He had seen a slip of paper reminding a classmate of some imminent trouble. But he could not account for everything, and for a while this unsettled him. And yet, if he were anything at all, Adam was adaptable. He wove this new skill in amongst the old ones, gained a reputation for being a lucky bastard, and carried on as usual. It was not until his final year as a student that things changed again.

There had, since that fateful night, been instincts – nudges, _knacks_ – that Adam had not been able to understand at all.

Something would pull him towards the creek which ran through the bottom of Aglionby’s grounds and he would find himself, half-distracted, clearing a mess of sticks which had caught in the rushes. A restless itch would settle in him when he restored the flow, and he’d return to his business feeling calm again. Days, weeks, a month later, while walking to church with the other boys, a niggle in the back of his mind would lead him to a bird’s nest, fresh fallen on the ground and every egg intact, and he would climb to replace it – in _this_ crook, like _this_ – and feel that peace once more.

Sometimes, because he was still a child and not that independent, near-mythical creature to which he aspired – an _adult_ – these instincts remained unresolved. He would wander, during the afternoon’s exercise period, to the boundary fence or Aglionby’s great iron gates, and stare intently into the distance, as though he could bridge it by thought alone. Unsurprisingly, he was considered not only _lucky_ but _odd_.

And yet, one day, as he stood by the gate looking out at something he could _sense_ , in the far distance, but could not see, a different sort of inkling tickled at his thoughts. He turned his head before he heard the rumble of wheels, and minutes later a cart trundled into view. Its driver pulled up by the side of the road, hopped down, rummaged around in her sack a moment, and approached the gate.

“There you are,” she said, as though they had arranged to meet and he was late. Her voice was almost impossibly small. He had to strain to hear it. She had strange black eyes and a cloud of white hair that fell almost to her knees. Her dress was old-fashioned, but surprisingly clean and neat for a peddler.

“Here I am,” Adam said, warily.

“Well, come on then, I haven’t got all day.” The woman beckoned him closer to the gate. Although he knew, intellectually, that talking to strange travelling women though Aglionby’s illustrious ironwork was not the sort of _good behaviour_ expected of him, Adam felt the familiar _nudge_ and stepped forward.

“There,” the woman said, slapping a small, black, velvet bag, held closed with a drawstring, into his open palms. Inside it he felt hard edges, shifting layers. “Now, I haven’t time to teach you much, but the trick is not to look at them too closely. To begin with, I wouldn’t look at them at all. Just keep your eyes closed and think of the trees. They’ll guide you true.”

She seemed satisfied with this explanation. Adam certainly was not.

“Oh, but don’t think about them _too_ hard,” she added, which was not remotely helpful, “There’s a lot of forest to get lost in, you know. It’s bigger than you think.”

Adam stared at her, closing his hands instinctively around the bag. Whatever was in it, it felt warm against his palms.

“I think that’s enough, now,” said the woman, “Go on. Mr Roach will be looking for his glasses in a minute, and you know how he gets.”

Adam did indeed know. He felt that tug again, pulling him back towards the dormitories.

“Um. Thank you,” he managed.

“Don’t fret about it too much,” she told him, sounding suddenly kind, “Even when you think everything lost, you’ll find you’re almost certainly on the right path. I’ll see you in a while.”

And then she got back up on her cart and rolled away. Adam had not seen her again yet, but he had a sense that, at some point, that would change. He had the impression that her sense of time was not his sense of time; her advice about the cards had been good, after all, but it had not seemed so for quite a while.

And so, though the cards had told him that something was coming, he had not been expecting the letter on that Thursday in particular. But he had been hoping for it.

Adam had never wanted to stay in one place all his life. _Freedom_ , that voice inside him still whispered. The lure of being dependant upon no-one but oneself. He did not yet have those things, but he was closer to them. Aglionby had offered him an opening of doors, an unexpected rush of possibilities. Now, just as it began to press in around him, feeling stale and making his feet itch, this letter arrived promising a new landscape, a new country. New doors, new possibilities. He would still have a master but freedom, Adam had come to realise, did not always come in the forms one expected, and never all at once.

He went to speak to the school superintendent, and then began to pack.

It was the Spring of 1855, in a small town to London’s south. Adam was twenty-two years old.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so it properly begins! The lonesome magician begining to discover his powers; not lonesome for too much longer, though, I think :)
> 
> As ever, comments and kudos etcetera make my heart happy, and I am so into talking to people about writing and gothic fiction and all the rest.
> 
> Next chapter:  
> A new country, a new home, new (to Adam, if not to us) faces.


	3. Its gleams of sunshine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A chapter of newness: people, places and (perhaps newest of all) the possibility of a home.

When the carriage rumbled through high, iron gates and into the park, Adam did not know what to expect. It took him a while to find out, too, because the gravel drive was long. For some time all he saw were trees and lawns and, beyond them, pastures dotted with red barns and cows. That, he supposed, explained the name.

Galway was, above all things, green. Green and lush, bright with life. Adam unhooked the latch on the little window and breathed deeply, tasting the potential of growing things. It was some twenty minutes before they passed an ornamental lake and drove through a beautifully curated aisle of trees, their branches twining overhead.

If he had expected something specific, the house which sprawled at the end of this avenue would not have been it. Adam was no student of architecture, but he had pored over his share of illustrated history books, and so he knew enough to see that this place was a chimera. The façade was much less grand than the grounds had led him to anticipate. The road divided, left and right along a low stone wall, and his driver took the middle way, direct towards the house. Looking out his window Adam was astonished to find that the ground fell away and the road was in fact a bridge over gently moving, muddy water; in the weeks to come, he would discover that the ornamental lake was in fact part of a series of interconnected ponds and waterways, one of which curved gently around the front of the house like a soft-edged crescent moon. Flowering vines tumbled down the banks, a riot of pale flowers, and their scent filled the cabin in a heady rush.

The carriage wheeled around to stop before wide, shallow steps and, gathering his overcoat and hat, Adam alighted.

It was impossible, from this angle, to examine the whole house at once. It might be impossible at any angle; there was an awful lot of house. The part he could see clearly was evidently old, and surprisingly modest. Its mullioned windows were bordered in white, neat against the red brick, and chimneys and attic dormers dotted the pitched roof. But over and around the edges of walls and gutters, other buildings loomed. Adam spied curlicues and buttresses, a mishmash of brick and grey stone. Somewhere to the left, a tower.

 _What a disaster_ , he thought as he studied it, and found himself reluctantly charmed.

The front door opened and a tall, wide, dark woman emerged with a brilliant smile.

“Mr Parrish,” she said, offering him her hand, “I am Mrs Sargent. I am delighted to meet you, I hope your journey was not too unpleasant.” Her accent was unapologetically English, a surprise after four day’s travel amongst heavy Irish brogues.

“Not at all,” Adam told her, shaking her hand. The coachman handed his bags off to a footman, who disappeared with them inside.

“Come in,” she ushered him inside, “We’ll have tea in the garden, and then you can meet your pupil.”

The inside of The Barnes was, if anything, even less expected than the outside. Mrs Sargent led him through a low, wide, wood-panelled corridor and out into a wholly astonishing flood of sunshine. If the façade had been modest, the foyer more than made up for it. A great divided staircase swept up curving walls to either side, leaving a wide open space on the marble tiles below. Adam’s footsteps echoed. Paintings and bronze sculptures clung to the pale green wallpaper or were secreted into sconces, set at intervals between floors. The stairs met above at the first landing, then divided again, curving back on themselves to a third story. Adam tilted his head back beneath the enormous chandelier and felt sunlight on his face, filtering down from a white cupola studded with circular windows.

Mrs Sargent was watching him with a knowing smile, “I know, it’s a little much. The Lynches are all too sentimental to change the outside of the house, but one of the previous masters decided that surprise was an effective way to awe his friends. Most of it is a little more subdued.”

She led him through a corridor, a drawing room, a formal music room, a parlour. Adam felt dizzy with the size of it. He was going to need a map. Pushing open French doors they found themselves on a wide terrace overlooking a manicured hedge maze and, beyond it, the structured chaos of a rose garden in bloom.

“Your room is in the western wing, but the formal gardens here in the east are better in the afternoon.” They sat at one of the small, iron tables, and a maid brought tea things on a tray. “So,” said Mrs Sargent comfortably, “Tell me about your journey. I have relatives in London, you know, but they don’t get to Ireland very often. I’ve been so looking forward to hearing the news.”

Adam did his best.

It was past four when Adam met his pupil.

Opal was a fey, sweet, thin, sharp child with unpredictable taste in clothing, toys and vegetables, and a surprisingly wicked sense of humour for a ten-year-old. She spoke in a garbled mess of Latin, English and a language Adam did not recognise, but which Mrs Sargent explained was Eastern European. Adam found himself pleasantly challenged to keep up with her. That his pupil was a little girl had surprised him at first, but the housekeeper explained that, given her linguistic quirks, the priority had been to find a tutor who was fluent enough in Latin and English to teach her anything at all.

“Of course, Mr. Lynch wishes you to focus on her English, particularly. The rest is all very well, but she’ll never be able to leave the estate unless she can speak a decent Queen’s.”

“Of course,” Adam said, “I understand. What of her other studies? I do play a little piano, and sketch, but I’m afraid I’m not really qualified to teach her how to be a young lady.”

Mrs Sargent chuckled, a warm and inherently welcoming sound, “Not to worry, Mr. Parrish. When she’s older she’ll winter with friends in London. They will socialise her very capably. Your job is to make sure they’ll understand her when she goes.”

“I believe I can do that, Mrs Sargent,” he assured her, and she smiled and patted his arm, and asked if he would like a tour of the garden. Opal, watching him with wide black eyes which seemed huge in proportion to her quick little face, snuck her tiny hand into his and managed, at least for a little while, to walk with them at a sedate adult pace. Adam did not know much about small girls, but he suspected they were not supposed to go haring off like a colt to cavort amongst the butterflies. Still, Mrs Sargent seemed unconcerned. Adam found himself again feeling, a little less reluctantly, charmed.

It was left entirely to Adam’s good judgement – he hoped – to devise a course of study, and since Opal was quick and clever, and Adam himself bored easily and could not abide waste in any form, he decided that it did not matter that this agile brain was housed in a delicate brown slip of a girl, he would teach her what he knew, and damned if it were ladylike or otherwise.

Opal was resistant to monolingualism, but avid in other areas. She devoured whatever books he could find in Latin – not quite literally, although given her table manners, he would not have been surprised – but would willingly puzzle through English tomes with him for hours on end, provided he could promise a good story. Like him, she adored the clean, precise lines of mathematical equations, and progressed quickly beyond what was standard for boys her age to know.

But her favourite subject by far was one which lay close, too, to Adam’s heart: the history and philosophy of nature. Adam was a rigorous teacher, and regardless of tantrums and entreaties he ruled that mornings were to be spent in the schoolroom. But afternoons were for the living, or more precisely, living _things_. Regardless of rain, hail or sunshine, no sooner did they rise from the luncheon table than the pair of them were out the door, putting their good enquiring minds to use.

The Barns was a beautiful estate. Henrietta had been beautiful, too, Adam supposed, but he had never been able to appreciate any part of it but the forest. Here, he could appreciate everything.

The house itself was, he now knew, _enormous_. It was not classically lovely, for it was too homely in some parts, too odd in others. Generations of Lynches had lived here and every one it seemed had added, subtracted, modified, updated. Torn down or built up. Replaced or renewed. It lolled ungovernably amongst its gardens, with more wings than seemed logically possible, and architectural styles enough to make Opal’s history lessons delightfully hands on.

But the house was not what made The Barns _The Barns_. Stretched around it for miles on every side was all manner of life and greenery. They said the United Kingdom had lost all its wildernesses, but at The Barns one could pretend. In some directions there was grazing land (it was, after all, a working farm), in others, formal gardens. The maze. The rose garden. In yet another direction, the flowerbeds (for viewing), another, the flowerbeds (for plucking). Vegetable gardens, herb gardens, a folly, a lake. And then, cutting a deep black-green swathe at the far end of the western lawn, a forest. This was not like the forest of Adam’s childhood which had, for all its rumoured strangeness – and now, to a man grown and educated in natural philosophy and the new sciences, those rumours often felt distinctly unsatisfactory – had occupied a relatively small, contained space. This forest stretched green tendrils over acres of estate land, but nobody resented it.

Adam’s bedroom window, on the second floor of the westmost wing, looked in this direction. Sometimes, on rare evenings when he could not sleep, Adam would sit at his window and look out over the trees. The circumstances had to be exceptional, because the truth was that for some reason Adam could not stand to look at the forest for very long. It woke something deep and strange inside him, a little bit alien, a little bit dangerous, which he was not yet ready to examine close-up. When he looked into the shadows between those trees he felt a pull, somewhere, low in his gut and at the same time a repulsion. Opal loved the forest. On her afternoons off she could almost always be found in the shade between tree trunks, stroking mossy boughs and whispering in her strange language to the birds. Many times she had tried to persuade Adam to join her, and with one part of his heart he longed to, almost unbearably, yet with the other he resisted just as strongly and could not tell even himself why.

In the garden was where Adam taught his pupil to draw, instructing her on the careful observation and precision necessary to capture living things on paper in all their detailed glory. Side by side they pencilled through every plant in the kitchen garden, collecting Latin names, and moths for the treefrogs who lived in a large, elevated vitrine – an extravagant gift from the mysterious Mr. Lynch, of whom Adam had yet to hear anything substantial – in one corner of the school room. When they came across a gap in Adam’s knowledge, Opal scampered before him to the library, and they would spend hours pawing through the Lynch family’s extensive collection of botanical texts. Someone, Adam thought, had been an avid natural philosopher, for this section of the library was rivalled only by the shelves of printed novels and hand-copied stories at the opposite end of the room. Adam found, inscribed neatly on the first page of a number of the more expensive botanical tomes, _A. Lynch_ , and wondered whether this flowing hand could possibly belong to Opal’s absent father.

Clues about this personage were sparse, and those he had stumbled upon thus far were strange indeed. There were Opal’s frogs, which betrayed both a carelessness for social norms and a care _ful_ ness regarding Opal’s specific temperament, and which spoke well for his employer. And there were the rooms – not one, or even two, but many rooms, a whole wing in fact on the floor above his own, full of…well. Rubbish, possibly. Objects, definitely, and a carpet of dust thick enough to swim in.

Adam had only caught glimpses of them when, during his first week in the house, he had taken it upon himself to investigate the place. He had wandered, he supposed, quite aimlessly up the staircase and to the right, and through a half-open door onto a long, uncarpeted hall. The large window at the end was opaque with dust, and he thought for a moment he saw the shadows of trees brush against it from the outside, an impossibility on the third floor. His cheeks had warmed hurriedly when Mrs. Sargent, turning a corner, had come upon him about to stick his head through a half-open door. She had turned quite pale with something like shock, then pink with embarrassment as she rushed to explain that these were old family belongings, not at all the sort of thing for guests or – Adam was aware that educators occupied an awkward position in the household hierarchy – well, the brothers Lynch were quite private about their things, you know, and – Adam took the hint and asked whether he could help her with her burden, and allowed himself to be swept back into the main part of the house. It was only after he had settled back into the library that he thought idly that, for a moment, Mrs. Sargent’s shock might almost have passed for fear.

So the family were collectors, that was certain, and the current Mr. Lynch was no exception. Regular conversations with the gardeners – three gruff old men who had been taken quite by surprise, Adam thought, first by the sudden intrusion of a small, peculiar ten-year-old into their daily lives, and then, more so, by a burgeoning fondness for her – revealed (albeit, Adam though, unintentionally on their parts) that scattered throughout the gardens were flowers, plants and even fruits which they, veterans all, had never seen anywhere but The Barns. Adam thought again of the elegant tail on the _A_ , the looping capital of the _L_ gracing those botanical volumes in the library. So, _A. Lynch_. Father, traveller, collector of rare plants.

But then again, there were the whispers. The Barns was, in all, a happy estate. Well run, productive. And Mrs Sargent, though ebullient and a little eccentric, ran a tight ship. Her kitchens and linen closets were rich in provender and bedding, and poor in malicious gossip. But there was _some_ gossip, and Adam, though he did exist in that strange limbo space between a servant and a guest, was still not entirely out of the loop. He heard enough to know that the bright sunlight of The Barns had, on more than one occasion, been darkened by some of the stickier vices. The prior Mr Lynch and his wife had died under circumstances which remained mysterious, leaving unpleasant echoes. The eldest and middle sons of the current Lynch generation did not get along. There had been fighting, drinking, bad behaviour. Particulars could not be had, but an undercurrent of unease was palpable whenever conversation turned to the much anticipated, never realised return of the current Master Lynch. Adam did not know what to make of it.

Opal was no help. When Adam first asked her opinion of her father, she looked confused, and would say only that she did not understand. When asked again at a later date what she thought of Mr Lynch she smiled delightedly and launched into a rapid, trilingual riddle of a tale about some very improbable adventures in Paris featuring large birds, a flying contraption, and a very fast horse. Adam smiled indulgently, and then made her go back and meticulously translate the tirade into first Latin, then halting English. He suggested that if she wrote it _very_ neatly she could add it to the fiction section in the library, and her momentary puzzlement was subsumed by enthusiasm for her task.

And so the spring, and then the summer, unfolded around them, bright and lush and verdant, and Adam’s days settled into a peaceful rhythm. He liked his work, and the company of Opal and the gardeners, and Mrs Sargent’s easy warmth. Though he was still, in theory, under thumb, it was an absent hand which held him, and he found he did not much mind having a master under circumstances like these. He was not precisely free, but he was content, which was much more unexpected. The months stretched, warmed, began to cool again. Adam felt very close to being alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to make this version of The Barnes older than the one in the book possibly is, and also bigger – but I still wanted it to feel farm-ish and interesting and dream-strange and surprisingly modest at first sight. I based the front part of the house on [Groombridge Place](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groombridge_Place#) (which a lot of people will know from the Kiera Knightly _Pride and Prejudice_ ) because, you know, why wouldn’t Ronan live in a farmhouse with a moat? Obviously.
> 
> Also, fun fact: Mrs (or, in another time, Ms) Sargent’s first name is Jimi. I know we don’t really get to see much of her in the original, but she does have this slightly invasive warmth and motherliness that makes her a good foil for the rest of these weirdos. Also, I needed to keep the rest of Fox Way for later.
> 
> Finally, I have not yet read CDTH or Opal’s short story. Thus, this contains no references to the above, and Opal in particular is characterised based solely on her appearance in The Raven Cycle. I love her. I love Ronan – and Adam – with her. But I’m not sure how canon-compliant my characterisation of her is. She does eat a lot of weird shit, so I feel like I’m at least in the ballpark.
> 
> ~  
> Next up: an accident, a mysterious stranger, a much anticipated (I'm sure) meeting.
> 
> As always, comments make my day <3


	4. Conventionality is not morality.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An accident, an unexpected arrival, a meeting.
> 
> Most importantly of all (let's not kid ourselves): Ronan Lynch.
> 
> _To say that Mr. Lynch was not what Adam expected was an understatement._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who is still reading - the pace picks up a bit from here, I think, because _Ronan_.

Though the days were still bright, lit with oranges and autumnal gold, the evenings were getting longer. Dusk stole upon Adam when he was not yet expecting it, and on this particular day a fog had rolled in, early, turning everything hazy and grey. Opal had the afternoon off and Adam, wanting something to do and perhaps a little time to himself, offered to take a parcel and some letters to the post office in the village. He set off briskly, enjoying the crisp chill of clean air on his jaw, the rustle of leaves beneath his feet. The lane was winding and narrow, bordered by thick hedges and a low wall, and with the fog thick around him and not a sound to be heard, Adam felt the world might have dropped away completely, leaving him alone and drifting in the mist. His feelings about this were mixed.

All of a sudden, and without a moment’s warning, a rider surged from the fog, rounding the bend at breakneck speed. Adam, who in the muffling cloud had not caught the thunder of approaching hooves in his one good ear, threw himself to the side of the road; the horse, spooking badly, reared and spun and the rider, with a sailor’s storm of cursing, fell heavily to the ground. Above them in the mist a huge black bird circled like an omen, screeches echoing strangely along the lane.

It took Adam a minute to recover from the shock, and then to remove himself carefully from the hedge’s enthusiastic embrace. He dusted himself off, checked for bruises, found that he was more or less intact. In the road, a dark bundle of riding clothes flopped, ungainly, and struggled to rise. The ribald curses of a moment before stuttered into a groan as the man pushed, staggered, listed sharply to one side.

“Sweet fucking Christ, _ow_.”

Adam approached the dark figure with caution, and not a little antagonism.

“Hurt, are you?” he said, “Maybe next time you’ll think twice before galloping through a fog.”

“Yes, thank you, I do so enjoy being condescended to by mysterious pricks who materialise out of the gloom to smite unwary travellers from their mounts. Come here so I can see you.”

The voice was powerful and obviously used to command, and Adam, though he had tried to break it, was still more in the habit of obedience than rebellion. He stepped closer to the stranger.

Limping though he was, Adam could tell the man was tall – taller even than he was – and strongly built. His face was pale in the twilight, with black hair cropped unfashionably close to his skull like a boxer or a hooligan, though his clothes seemed well cut and contemporary. Everything about him was sharp: his jaw, his cheekbones, the proud curve of his nose. Most of all his eyes, which were pale as glaciers and frostbite, and fixed unerringly on Adam’s face as though intending to bore straight through it and into the brain beyond.

Adam coughed, feeling sudden heat in his throat, “Do you need assistance to stand?” he made to move forward.

“ _No_.”

Adam stood his ground, “As you please.” He could not in good conscience abandon anyone, even this brute, injured, in the middle of the road and with night coming on. He glanced over the man’s shoulder to where his horse, an enormous beast and black as shadows, stood heaving and shivering by the hedge. The man swore and made a grab for him as Adam held out a hand, but Adam sidestepped easily and approached the animal, palm up, gently as a lamb.

For a moment the very evening seemed to hold its breath. Then the great beast lowered its muzzle to sniff at his fingers, and Adam tangled a sure hand in its reigns.

“Well well,” said the stranger, low and sarcastic, “You are unexpected indeed. What are you, then? A sprite? A woodland fairy? A lost spirit?”

Adam snorted, but softly, smoothing his hand over the horse’s nose, “I assure you, sir, I am as much flesh and blood as you.”

“So you say,” the man snapped, “But see how you’ve bewitched my bloody horse! He’s not supposed to bow down to any old tramp on the road.”

Adam looked back at him over his shoulder. The man had turned himself awkwardly to watch, and was teetering on one foot, the other held at an odd and obviously painful angle beside him. Adam smiled coldly and politely, “Forgive me for being so forward, sir. Please do feel free to catch him yourself. I’m sure he’ll wait patiently while you limp about.”

To what was evidently their mutual surprise, the stranger barked out a laugh.

“Oh, I’m fucking sure. Well alright, then, horse whisperer. Bring him here.”

Adam considered exacting some token, at least, of good manners, but it was getting cold and he still hoped to reach the post office before it closed for the night. He brought the horse towards its rider and then stood while the man ran surprisingly gentle fingers over the beast’s neck, deftly reassuring the animal until it waffled companionably at his sleeve and deigned to stand meekly while its rider attempted to mount.

‘Attempt’ being the operative word, for once again the stranger swore viciously, though softer this time, then leaned his forehead against the horse’s flank.

“If I ask a favour of you, sprite, I hope you’ll not demand my firstborn in return.”

“Any child of yours would surely be more trouble than its worth,” Adam told him caustically, and the stranger laughed again, “What do you need from me?”

“Your shoulder, and good horse sense, while I limp to that sty. My ankle is buggered to hell, I can’t stand on it, but I think I can mount from there.”

Adam obliged. The stranger’s arm was a warm, sinuous weight across his shoulders. There was something oddly grounding about it. In this twilight dreamscape of mist and shadows, it was a strange jolt to touch another human being, to feel his strong hand grip the meat of Adam’s upper arm.

Sooner rather than later the man sat once more astride his horse. As he paused for a moment looking down at Adam, the dark bird, which had been circling above them all this time, plummeted suddenly from the mist in a cacophony of wings and talons. Adam flinched back instinctively and heard the stranger laugh, again that sharp bark of surprised mirth. When he looked back the bird had settled, incongruously, on his pommel. Staring up into the stranger’s pale, sharp eyes Adam thought of tales his Irish Latin master had told about the Wild Hunt, the Morrigan, the Raven King. _Myths_ , he thought, and then, _Magic_.

“And you asked if I were some fairy sprite,” he managed finally, when the moment had stretched too long to be ignored.

“I did,” the stranger told him, “And I remain unconvinced that you are otherwise. Where would a mere man be going, on an evening such as this?”

Here Adam was back on firmer ground. Practical, practiced, ordinary. Dull.

“The post office,” he said, shortly. No magic, here. That was one certainty.

But the man above him looked puzzled, then wary, “The post office? So you haven’t come from the village?”

“No. I came from above,” Adam gestured back up the hill, “From The Barns.”

“The Barns?” if anything, the man looked warier still, and Adam noticed for the first time a glint of something dangerous in those hard eyes, though he thought perhaps it had been there all along. The man leaned forward in his saddle, looming over Adam, “What business have _you_ at the Barns, sprite?”

Perhaps the stranger expected him to cower, but in this he had miscalculated. Adam had had a lifetime’s practice standing straight in the face of physical menace, and his spine remained unbent. “I am tutor there,” he said calmly, and the stranger blinked. Again, for a moment, he looked puzzled. Then light seemed to dawn behind his eyes.

“Bugger me, I’d forgotten. Of course. The tutor. Well, _tutor_ , best be off, hadn’t you? Wouldn’t want to be out too late,” He grinned as he turned his horse uphill, away from Adam, and dug in his heel, “Wild folks ride these lanes at night.”

“Hooligan,” Adam muttered under his breath, and the rider might have heard him because, again, he laughed.

“Mr Parrish!” Mrs Sargent accosted him in the hall, “Oh, Mr Parrish, good, you’re back. We’ve had such a ruckus. Mr Lynch has arrived, unannounced as usual, and he had an accident on his way here. He’s been asking after you for an hour – here, give me your hat and things – he’s in the drawing room. Mind you don’t – ” she paused, and Adam, who had handed off his coat and gloves and now stood poised, feet already turned towards the door she had indicated, tried to wait politely. “Well, as you’ll find out for yourself, the master can be quite...abrupt. And worse, you know, when he’s hurting. So just don’t you take him too much to heart, lad, will you? He’s not a bad sort. Just prickly.”

‘Prickly’, as it happened, was an understatement. When Adam stepped into the drawing room and looked up he found himself positively skewered by the palest, coldest eyes he’d ever seen. Adam froze at the doorway.

The stranger glowered up at him from the depths of his chair, “Is that any way to greet the man who pays your wages?”

Adam blinked. Too startled to be anything but frank, he asked, “ _You_ are Mr. Lynch?”

“One of them,” the man’s mouth twisted sourly, “But I am the master of this house, and I was under the impression that my newest employee was a man of ‘good breeding’.” He said this last as though it was not a compliment, which was fine with Adam because it was not technically true.

Lynch sat – sprawled, rather – in one of the deep wing-backed chairs which bracketed the hearth. One leg kicked out carelessly in an oddly boneless way; the opposite foot was propped up on a stool, trousers rolled back to the knee. The ankle was blackened with bruising, and swollen badly. Internally, Adam winced.

In the fire’s warm light, Mr Lynch should have looked softer than the wicked-sharp figure who had plunged from the mist and so nearly brained Adam with his horse. He didn’t. If anything, face half hidden in the deep recess of the chair, his pale eyes only glowed colder, sharper, more singularly. He looked like a fairy prince, dangerous and strange, slunk in to sit by a mortal hearth and play at being a man. He looked like he was trying to unstring Adam with his eyes, find out what made him tick deep in his bones.

A flicker of lighter movement caught Adam’s attention, and he tore his gaze away to look further into the room. At the far end, tucked into a pool of yellow lamplight, Opal was swiftly disembowelling an enormous wooden trunk. The rug around her was a sea of pale tissue paper and wads of cotton wool, interspersed with strange treasures: a corn-haired doll, a miniature carriage, a heavy wooden mask with ivory teeth. She barely lifted her head to grin at Adam before returning to her plunder.

Adam shook himself and stepped quickly across the rug. Automatically, he offered his hand. “I apologise, sir. I am Adam Parrish. Please forgive my hesitation, I was not expecting…” Lynch took his hand in a firm grasp and Adam trailed off for a moment, eyes flitting between Lynch and Opal, crouched over her box of marvels. He had thought perhaps that the light had tricked him, but no, the hand in his was firm and smooth. A young man’s hand, to be sure.

Lynch smiled in a wide, thin manner which gave the impression of a mouth overfilled with teeth. He let Adam’s hand fall and settled languidly back into his chair, watching him.

“Settle down, Parrish, I can hear the gears whirring from here. Opal is mine by contract, not by blood. Her sire was a scoundrel and a thief, but a very fine musician for all that. When he was working or had not the funds to feed her – which was often – he used to leave her with a particularly archaic sect of nuns. This, by the by, explains the linguistic shitstorm I hired you to ameliorate.

“Unfortunately for him, though perhaps not for her, he was less adept at thievery than fiddling, and eventually his problems got the better of him. Since I was, at the time, his patron, I handled his affairs. Perhaps I should have left Opal with the good sisters, but my relationship with the church is, shall we say, complex, and I could not stomach it. I transplanted her here in the hopes that good Irish soil might remedy some of her less delightful European defects, a plan of which you are yourself a part.” He levelled Adam with a clear, piercing gaze. Though his lip curled slightly at one corner, Adam could not tell whether mirth or scorn had stirred it, “Tell me, _Mr. Parrish_ ,” his name, in Lynch’s mouth, was an unpredictable thing. Adam was not sure he liked it, “Do you think me saintly for saving some wastrel’s bastard from a life of drudgery and poor Latin?”

“It was certainly a very generous thing to do,” Adam said, treading carefully.

“No, it wasn’t,” Lynch snapped. He gave Adam another hard look and then turned his frigid, adamantine gaze to the fire. Leaning forward he propped his chin on one hand, studying the blaze, “It was, at best, whimsical. Dick was right to berate me for it. I had no business acquiring a child or carting her across the ocean. What’s she supposed to do, locked up in this dusty old crypt? There’s nothing for her here.” He rubbed ferociously at his forehead, reddening the skin there. “But I couldn’t leave her behind, either. She’s such a strange little thing. I felt I could not abandon her to those abominably straight-laced crones. Christ. They couldn’t even teach her to speak one language.”

Adam tried to imagine Opal – wild, omnivorous, intelligent Opal – buttoned tightly into orphan’s black and suffering the same cold, gloomy classrooms of his childhood. No one to chase after her through the rose garden, or set her maths problems hard enough to distract her from nibbling her slate. The phantom girl his mind produced was a pale, wasted echo of the bright imp poring over her gifts in the corner.

“I think it was right to bring her here, despite the inconvenience. She loves The Barnes. She’s happy.”

Mr Lynch glanced up at him in surprise. “You sound as though you like her,” he said, and Adam frowned at him, offended at once on both his and Opal’s behalf.

“I do like her. She’s…” fascinating, bizarre, unexpectedly funny, “Clever. And interesting. I think we get along quite well, considering I spend my mornings forcing her to speak a language she clearly despises.”

Just as in the lane, Mr Lynch’s bark of laughter seemed to surprise them both. Opal, who had finished unpacking her box and was content to leave the mess until someone forced her to clean it up, heard this and galloped over at full speed, flinging herself half over the arm of Lynch’s chair to twine her arms around his neck.

“ _Munera, munera **[1]**_!” she kissed his cheek with more enthusiasm than grace, and Mr Lynch suffered it with about the same enjoyment as a poorly trained puppy at the hand of a grabby child, “ _Te amo **[2]**_.”

“English, Opal,” Adam reminded her, trying to keep his face straight.

“Why?” she looked between them, “I am understood.”

“ _Vero, es **[3]**_ ,” Lynch agrees easily, to Adam’s surprise, “But we are trying to teach you how to sham normalcy, and it won’t work if you can’t speak like a native. You want to be able to leave The Barns some day, don’t you?”

“ _Non_ ,” Opal said petulantly, but Adam knew it wasn’t true.

“You ought to show Mr Lynch some of the stories you’ve been translating,” he told her, trying to divert the conversation onto safer ground, “Not everybody can read the originals in Latin, of course, so Opal has been adding to your library.”

Mr Lynch darted a look at him over Opal’s head, and though Adam could not altogether interpret those fierce, pale eyes, he thought he saw a hint of wary curiosity.

To say that Mr. Lynch was not what Adam expected was an understatement.

For one thing, he was young. Younger even, possibly, than Adam himself, though he was such a mess of contradictions that Adam found it difficult to say for sure. At times he was more childlike than Opal, inquisitive and petulant by turns, undeterred by social conventions, invasive, luxuriously rude. He flung himself about on the furniture and scowled like a spoilt five-year-old when his bother came to call.

At other times he seemed positively ancient. He was very tall, with an inch or two on Adam’s lanky frame, but sometimes Adam would come upon him suddenly in an empty hallway or by one of the windows in the western rooms which overlooked the forest, and would find him stooped, round shouldered, as if burdened by great age or trouble.

His eyes, which were unusually light and clear, could dance with mirth or rage, then turn in a moment to still, flat mirrors which seemed to repel the gaze, revealing nothing but the viewer’s own insecurities. He had a piercing, hawkish gaze, and Adam was thankful for the many years he had spent under scrutiny – his father’s, watching always for the slightest misstep, later his the curt attention of his teachers, and now Opal, whose luminous dark eyes followed him intently in every room – for it had inured him, to some extent, to the sensation of being stared at. Or so he had believed, at least, until Mr. Lynch’s arrival, whereupon he discovered that perhaps he was not so indifferent to study as he had hoped. Something about Lynch’s sharp, avid regard made his collar feel tight at times, his hands prickle. He disliked it, perhaps; or perhaps he didn’t.

And he was a beautiful man, though in that regard, also, there was a sharpness that seemed so keen sometimes that Adam thought even Lynch himself might be cut. Adam had seen him duck away to avoid a mirror, was bemused by the close-cropped hair and frequently stubbled mornings that seemed to betray some mysterious inner tension between control and disarray. One day, passing an under-frequented drawing room towards the back of the house, Adam saw that the maids were turning over the dust sheets. An enormous portrait dominated the wall above the mantle, a beautiful blonde woman, seated, and a dark man stood by her shoulder. For a moment, Adam thought it was Lynch. But no. The expression was subtly different. The way this man’s mouth ticked up in a fractional smile…Adam had never seen a hint of that cruelty on the current Mr Lynch’s face. The father, then, or some earlier relative. The resemblance was remarkable, and Adam saw in his mind how Lynch would appear with those dark curls, smiling his thin, over-toothful smile delightedly at some new mischief Opal had planned. Perhaps it was lucky he shaved his head like an invalid. The man in the portrait had certainly known how to use those dark good looks to his advantage.

The present Lynch, it was clear, had no such charms. He was blunt and taciturn, and singularly graceless as a patient. He raged at the physician, swore at his lawyer, and when one morning Adam glimpsed a tall, spare young man crossing the hall, the whole household played auditory witness to the cacophony of smashing glass and shouting that chased him out again – albeit quite sedately – not half an hour later. That, Mrs Sargent told Adam, had been the eldest Lynch brother, and apparently the violence of the siblings’ encounter could not wholly be blamed on the pain and inconvenience of a battered ankle. To be perfectly frank, by the close of Mr Lynch’s first week at The Barnes, Adam was largely inclined to dislike him. Though Lynch had clearly won a place in Opal’s heart, Adam was understandably leery of men who threw their weight around, and he had a particular dislike of those who leveraged their position to do so.

Thus, it was with some surprise that Adam came to realise Lynch’s tantrums did not affect the rest of the household at all. Once, when she threw herself across a room towards him unannounced, Adam saw his employer snap his teeth bodily in Opal’s direction; but as this did not faze her (except later, when Adam felt compelled to explain that this was not, in fact, a form of greeting she should adopt henceforth) he could make no serious objection. To his servants, Mr Lynch was – as he had, apparently, always been – distant, brief and cold, yet, ultimately, fair and civil. More civil, in fact, than many a man of his station whom Adam had met before.

And as the weeks progressed, towards Adam himself his employer seemed to show yet another side.

To Adam, Lynch was rarely, technically, polite. But nor was he distant or cold, nor yet vicious or violent. If Adam had been forced to put it into words, he would have said that his employer seemed…curious. Like his raven, Lynch had a strange, still way of being in a room with Adam. Not the indolent stillness of a man at rest but the listening, active stillness of an animal. What qualities Adam possessed to inspire such close attention he could not guess, yet as the days progressed he found himself more and more often summoned of an evening – and later, even without explicit invitation, drawn – to the wide hearth in the drawing room, and the chair opposite its master.

“What is that?” Lynch asked abruptly. They had been sitting in companionable silence for some twenty minutes or more. It was late, and the great house was still around them.

Unspeaking, Adam tilted his page into the firelight. Lynch leant forwards in his chair to peer at it.

“Flowers, Parrish? Unexpected, I’ll admit.”

“It’s for Opal. She hopes to make an account of your most unusual specimens. We’ve been studying a book of etchings of the Ashmolean Museum, and she is convinced that one of the scholars there could identify them, if only we could bring them accurate descriptions.”

“Is she, indeed.” Lynch scowled darkly.

It was a surprisingly strong reaction, Adam thought, to a childish whim, particularly because it had been clear from the first that Mr Lynch truly loved his ward. Adam would find them together in the school room some mornings, curved over a book of engravings or the tank of frogs, dark heads bent inwards, thick as thieves. When they looked up at him their smiles were so alike in wickedness and wildness that Adam wondered more than once whether Lynch could be lying about Opal’s parentage. It would not be the first time a wealthy young man had denied a bastard child. But he was so young, and Opal was almost eleven. Perhaps they had simply been together so long that – unfortunately for everyone else – she had absorbed some of his traits.

“You’re spoiling her,” Lynch growled, now.

“I really don’t think so.”

Adam did not know from whence it had sprung, this candid, intimate way of speaking which had grown between himself and his employer. Perhaps it was their strange first meeting, or their shared affection for his ward. Lynch was hardly an easy conversationalist. But something about his manners – or lack thereof – and the way his sharp eyes, always so focussed on Adam as he spoke, seemed to belie his apparently careless sprawl… It disarmed him, somehow. Made him speak to Lynch as though they were equals, ribbing each other like old friends; or, rather, like _new_ friends, each still feeling the other out.

At least, that was what Adam supposed it was like, to make a new friend. He certainly had not had much personal experience. But he could not deny that he was enjoying it, this delicate, private thing between them which bloomed only at night, once the rest of the household was abed and the two of them were sat on either side of the hearthrug, soft-lit by flames. In that warm twilight he sometimes thought he could feel Lynch’s gaze, like a brush against his cheek. He found he rather liked this fancy.

“Indulging, then.”

“Perhaps.”

“Girl’s got no business trying to show my… _collection_ to anybody.”

“I think it’s commendable in a child, to have such a keen sense of curiosity. She’s very quick, you know.”

Lynch snorted, “Oh, I know it. Damn brat will be the death of me, growing like a weed, asking all those godforsaken questions.”

“If you’d hoped to dissuade her from that, you really ought not to have provided such an inviting schoolroom,” Adam told him, lulled into truthfulness by the quiet, the fire’s warmth, the pleasant exhaustion of a day’s work done well. “If she spent her days numbed from sitting on a wooden bench, and rubbing her hands together just to get sufficient feeling to hold her pencil, I can guarantee she would not wish to waste any additional time on learning.”

“Like you did?” Lynch asked him, razor edged. It was one of those strange, sidelong attacks he threw out sometimes. Adam was never prepared for them, always taken by surprise by the unexpected display of wanton perceptiveness. And then, before Adam could do more than gather his brows together, the other man laughed, suddenly, short and wild. “You are right, of course. I do encourage her. In my defence, there are worse habits I could foster.” His teeth glinted white from the shadows as he grinned, and Adam felt a very different sort of shiver course his spine, though he could not identify its import, “I know them all.”

So what did Adam think of his intense, mercurial employer? Honestly, he could not say. But life at The Barnes was certainly less predictable now its master was in residence. That little part of Adam that had been waiting, waiting, content enough but sluggish, still more than half asleep, began to stir and raise its head. Perhaps he could use a little chaos.

[1] Gifts, gifts

[2] I love you

[3] Yes, you are

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Latin is not a language I speak _at all_. Corrections welcome, otherwise, blame Google translate.
> 
> A note on animal names (because I named them, even if it's not mentioned explicitly):
> 
> 1) Mr Rochester’s horse, as _Jane Eyre_ fans may know, is called Mesrour, which is actually a bit racist because apparently Victorians used this name – which originally comes from _The Book of the Thousand and One Nights_ – as a kind of shorthand to refer to ‘The Orient’ or Blackness. Not black as in the colour – which is an appropriate name for a horse – but capital B Blackness, as in human beings who are not white, are part of various distinct cultures, etc. So, obviously, I didn’t feel comfortable using that. _Misrule_ , however, sounds a bit similar while actually meaning ‘disruption of peace; disorder’, which seemed like a delightfully Ronan name for a horse. It's also what I actually assumed Rochester's horse was called when I first listened to the audiobook as a kid, because I'd never heard the name 'Mesrour'.
> 
> 2) I always interpreted Chainsaw was an auditory joke because, you know, ravens. Not very melodic. Bonesaw seemed like a solid mid 19th century equivalent, while retaining the slightly horrified audience reaction of the original, in true Ronan style.
> 
> ~  
> Next chapter: nightmares, predictions, conversations at midnight and otherwise.
> 
> Please do leave a comment if you enjoy what you've read - it makes my day and also makes me super excited about posting the next chapter, which is such a good way to feel about writing :)


	5. In the corresponding quarter.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nightmares arise, magic is exposed, and characters - and the delicate threads between them - develop.
> 
> _A soft foot scuffed behind him and Adam jerked upright like a spring-loaded toy._
> 
> _“No,” said a sleep-rough voice, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for descriptions of dreamed domestic violence, probably a bit worse than canon - it's right at the start, so if you just do a word search for 'Adam rose' you're good from there.

Sometimes, Adam dreamed of the night his father had died.

The dream came in many variations. The beginning was always the same; the sensation of waking, every hair on end, was so complete that he was rarely aware that it was a dream, but rather thought that he had truly come awake. This was not a pleasant experience. His body flooded with fear before his mind could identify its cause, and once again he lay frozen in his little bed in the garret, barely able to breathe. It was not until he heard the first footstep that he knew how the dream would go. Sometimes, it played out just as it had, and he woke damp-cheeked and cold, ankle burning with long-dormant pain. Sometimes it was better. He slipped silently from his bed and leapt for the tree, dropped lightly to the ground and was away. Somehow, on those good nights, time and space folded around him, so that he was enveloped by deep tree shadows before his father even knew he was gone.

And then there were the bad nights.

Adam would never know what his father had intended that night. Sometimes he thought that the chill dread of not knowing would never leave him, that he would forever wake still and afraid, listening for the turning of a knob, the delicate _snick_ of a lock. In his mind, he played out every scenario he could imagine. Robert Parrish had been a violent man, a rageous man, a cruelly practical man. He had never beaten Adam so badly that he could not perform his work the next day. He had kept the worst of the bruising from the skin others would see.

In his nightmares, Robert Parrish beat Adam’s head against a wall until his skull split like ripe fruit.

He kicked until dreamed organs pushed up through Adam’s throat, and he spit his heart out onto his father’s boots, followed by his intestines.

In his nightmares Adam died by his father’s hand brutally, strangely, bloodily, again, and again, and again.

When he woke truly, his shirt sticky with sweat, he would wait, still as a rabbit, barely breathing, and listen for a footstep in the hall.

The problem with dreaming of waking was that it always took a while to convince himself, when he did wake, that it was real. Adam stretched his fingers long over his heart and felt the pounding slowly subside. It was a good hour later that he realised he was definitely not going to fall back asleep.

Adam rose, already resenting his subconscious. He had grown used to not being exhausted, and already he was remembering how it would feel tomorrow. Another thing to hate his father for. His room had cooled overnight, and he wrapped himself in his thick winter dressing gown to ward off the chill; it was a deep blue wool, thickly quilted, a wild extravagance he’d bought in his first winter of teaching, once the shock of a steady income had waned. As he shrugged into it Adam felt some measure of his calm return. He was safe, he was alone, he had control over his own belongings and his fate. He slipped his feet into thick stockings and padded out into the hall.

He had no destination in mind. The great house seemed, if anything, even vaster at night, dark and silent as a country, palpably asleep. He traced his fingers over the wallpaper, wandered slowly to the end of one hallway, then another. He wasn’t really surprised to find himself in the grand foyer. All roads within the Lynch house led, eventually, to here. At night the hall below was black as deep water, while the cupola above shone ghostly white, the moon framed perfectly within one round window. Adam sat at the edge of the landing and threaded his legs through the bannisters, dangling his feet into the void. Here, he was level with the massive chandelier. It gleamed in the darkness like some strange and massive sea creature, oddly symmetrical, hovering in the gloom.

He was not sure how long he sat there. The moon had moved, disappearing behind one window’s frame and then, some time later, reappearing in a new one. He counted the crystals on the chandelier. He stared into the darkness below him, eyes finding or inventing patterns in the shadows.

A soft foot scuffed behind him and Adam jerked upright like a spring-loaded toy.

“No,” said a sleep-rough voice, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Mr Lynch had just this morning graduated from crutch to walking cane, and the speed of his limping stride had increased a thousand-fold, to the general resignation of staff, stable-hands, and anyone else who had been enjoying the relative peace of slow movements and a thumping early warning system. But he was not aiming for speed now, and as Adam half-turned, warily, to watch, Lynch approached him on slow, uneven, stockinged feet alone.

“Can’t sleep, Parrish?” Lynch dropped carelessly, gracefully to the floor. His dark red dressing gown pooled around him, black in the moonlight. “Nor could I.”

“What’s your excuse?” Adam asked him, playing along.

Lynch shrugged noncommittally, “Bad dreams. You?”

Adam shrugged back, “The same.”

To his surprise Lynch leaned into him, then, jostling his shoulder just a little. Adam felt heat bleeding off him, despite the double thickness of their dressing gowns and nightshirts, and felt an obscure pang of comfort. Nobody had ever sat up with him before, in the wake of a nightmare. Even if Lynch were here for his own reasons, it was…nice. To not face the dark entirely alone. To feel the warm weight of their arms pressed together. Grounding, calm.

The idea of Mr Lynch being a calm _or_ particularly grounding force would never have occurred to Adam in the daylight. But night made many things possible. Night turned dreams into real things that could wake you, shake you, make you tremble and sweat. Its magic could go either way and, sitting on the landing, feet dangled together into emptiness, Lynch resembled nothing so much as the fey spirit for which he had once mistaken Adam. The moon was full, bright as a stage-light washing down over them from the round window above. It stripped Lynch of any colour he might have hand and instead made pale stone of his skin, hair and features sketched in with soft charcoal and black ink. If it weren’t for his arm, a steady line of warmth against him, Adam would not be certain he was even here. He could be a figment. A trick of the moonlight. A part of the night itself.

“Getting cold, Parrish. You should get back to your bed.”

Adam nodded absently. They stayed where they were.

Opal was curled catlike in the window seat, basking in the morning sun. Her dark curls were bent over a maths problem and she chewed absently at a discarded page. Adam, who had long since given up on trying to dissuade her from eating things that were, on balance, at least not poisonous, left her to her own devices. He had found a book of engravings of Egypt, large enough that he had cleared one end of the long table to lay it out, and he was bent over a page with a magnifying lens, examining the details of a carving. He wondered if there were any books or journals that might help him to learn hieroglyphics. He had his back to the door, but the syncopated thump of cane and booted feet was as distinctive as his employer’s silhouette. Adam half-turned towards the door as it opened, and Mr Lynch glared back at him.

“I’m paying you to teach her things, not pillage my library.”

Adam gazed at him levelly, “With all due respect, Mr Lynch, I do not believe the two are mutually exclusive.”

“Do you not, indeed.”

“Opal,” Adam spoke over his shoulder, “Come show Mr Lynch what you’re working on.”

Suffused with the kind of enthusiasm Adam’s teachers had mostly discouraged in their cold, ordered classrooms, but which Adam could never bring himself to censure, Opal bounded from the window seat, brandishing her page. Mr Lynch stumbled awkwardly when she flung her arms about his waist, steadying himself against the doorjamb.

“Like a fucking catapult,” he grumbled, “How many times have I told you not to throw yourself at people, imp? Some time, somebody will drop you on your arse, and then you’ll be sorry.” Opal ignored him with a nonchalance Adam hoped some day to emulate, and waved her paper under his nose. “Alright, alright,” he wound his free arm around her shoulders, “Be still, brat, let me look at it.” He studied the page with a frown, and then looked up at Adam and raised an eyebrow. “You give this to a ten-year-old?”

Adam shrugged and leaned back against the table. It was hard to maintain his usual rigid professionalism around Mr Lynch; the man was so ruthlessly disdainful of social conventions, swearing fondly at Opal and grumpy in a diffuse, omnilateral way. It was hard both to take his temper personally and, in the face of such wilful naturalism, be anything but natural in return. Or at least as natural as Adam, who had never been anything in his life but carefully studied, knew how to be.

“She’s equal to it,” he told Lynch. Opal grinned at him wide, over her shoulder, and he levelled her a look that was only half-serious, although they had in fact had this conversation just the other week, “I have to keep her interested or she’ll eat all the paintbrushes.”

“Christ,” Lynch said feelingly, rolling his eyes heavenward, “You’re a menace.” Opal giggled at him and he tightened his arm around her with a sort of careless tenderness that made Adam feel like a voyeur, abruptly conscious of being an outsider.

“Are you two finished with this nonsense or what?”

Adam blinked at his employer, then slid his eyes to his pupil, who was already starting to bounce with poorly contained excitement, “Usually, we work until lunch. What did you have in mind?”

“One of the cows went and got herself knocked up out of season. I’ve had the men bring her down to the near barn, and I just received word it’s started.” He looked down at Opal, “It will be bloody and messy and smell bad, and Mrs Sargent will scold us all because it is not a sight for young ladies. Do you want to go?”

Opal, of course, did. Adam stooped to retrieve the forgotten maths problem as her footsteps thundered away down the corridor.

“You take a keen interest in her passions,” he said carefully, setting the page on Opal’s little escritoire.

Lynch grunted and shrugged. “You know what she’s like. She’d pester me interminably if she found out I’d kept her from it.”

“True,” Adam said. Although, as they were both well aware, it was not the entire truth. They followed Opal outside and to small, decorative barn – some ancestor’s folly which the current Lynch, evidently impatient with useless things unless they were surpassingly strange or beautiful, had turned to good use – which sat oddly at the edge of the flower garden. Adam matched his steps to Mr Lynch’s slow, limping progress the whole way.

“What game is that?” Opal asks, flinging herself down on the hearth rug beside Adam to peer closely at his cards.

“Don’t eat them,” Adam says automatically. With Opal, he has found it’s generally best to get this out of the way first. “It isn’t a game, precisely. I ask a question in my mind, and then the cards help me to find an answer.”

“How do they know what to say?” she asks him, sensibly.

Adam frowns down at the pile before him and shrugs one shoulder, “To be honest, I don’t really know. They were given to me when I was a boy. I never had the chance to ask how they work.”

“But they tell you things?”

“They do.”

“True things?”

“So far, yes.”

“Can _I_ ask a question?”

Adam glances at her. Again he frowns, slightly. “I’m not certain. I don’t know whether the answers are _in_ the cards, or whether the cards are only a means of getting _to_ the answers, and so I’m not sure whether the skill is transferable. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I don’t think you should, sprog,” says a voice behind them. Adam glances up sharply, feeling a flush rise in his cheeks. Lynch must have ducked in through the side door of the schoolroom, by Adam’s bad ear, and he feels an acute embarrassment to be caught like this, cross-legged on the hearth-rug in his shirtsleeves, his pupil sprawled beside him and his _tarot_ cards spread on the floor. Lynch hardly seems the type who would stand for spiritual nonsense in his house. Besides which, he’s a Catholic. Of course he would not want Opal exposed to this.

“I apologise, Mr Lynch,” he says quickly, beginning to gather up the cards, “It won’t –”

But Lynch, to his surprise, is already levering himself awkwardly down to sit on his other side. “Nonsense, Parrish. Don’t stop now. I only mean that…well. Perhaps it’s best if you do the reading. I don’t think Opal’s old enough to be dabbling in the divinatory arts. Are you any good?”

Adam blinks at him. Every time he thinks he understands Mr Lynch, he says something that sets Adam to wondering again.

“Yes,” he says, automatically, because it’s true, “I’m very good.”

“Well, then,” Lynch says, leaning back against the armchair and favouring Adam with one of his lazier, ever-so-slightly less wolfish smiles, “Get to it.”

“You wish me to read for you?”

“Certainly. Tell me, Parrish, have I a dark, handsome stranger in my future?”

Adam huffs a laugh. “Is that really what you wish to know?”

Ronan’s face changes subtly, but Adam can see that it happening, the moment when he turns inwards and gets quiet. “No,” he says, “But I believe I may have…a choice to make, soon. I’d like to know if they’ve anything to say about that.”

“Alright. I assume you know how to shuffle?”

With an obviously practiced hand, Ronan first shuffles and then cuts the cards into three rough piles. Adam lifts an eyebrow at him. The master of The Barnes is certainly full of surprises this evening. Reaching out, Adam flips the cards, one by one.

The Knight of Swords. His mouth quirks, unbidden, into a smile as Mr Lynch, simultaneously, scowls.

“Always the fucking same,” he grumbles, “Well, I suppose that means you are what you say after all.”

Lynch is right. Direct, impatient, daring; and, conversely, rude, arrogant, and possessed of a vicious streak. The Knight is certainly his card.

Adam turns the next card, and glances quickly at Opal, embarrassed. Lynch huffs out a laugh but appears otherwise unconcerned. A pair of lovers lie entwined in a field of impossible flowers. Adam looks up at the other man to find him already looking back, brows raised enquiringly.

“Well?”

“It’s not hard to decipher, Lynch. Partnerships, duality, a union. In reverse it could mean loss of balance or disharmony, or a one-sided affection, but, see, here it stands upright.” Still, Mr Lynch scowls, and Adam hurries to turn the next card.

He pauses, feeling…something tug inside him, and gazes down, puzzled. The Magician lies upright on the rug, representing willpower, desire, skill. A person who is resourceful and focussed, who has the enviable power to bring things into being. Yet, when it is reversed, it depicts someone manipulative and cunning. Talent wasted, illusions, deceit. In theory, these might be two sides of the same person, and Adam has always felt that such an individual would be difficult, possibly dangerous to know.

Lynch is mercurial and angry, that is clear, but he also has a warmth about him so strong it bleeds out into the very air. He is unfailingly invested in Opal’s happiness, and so gentle with the beasts he has tamed that they seek him out even when he has set them free. Would he really wish to form a partnership with someone like that? Is this the decision he is weighing up? The cards seem to whisper an affirmative, in that way they have of saying more than is legible at the surface. Whatever it is that drives Adam’s gift and allows him to read them truthfully, it believes that Lynch will and should choose to tie himself to this magician.

“This is the person with whom you may unite,” he says, resting a finger against the card, “They are both a foil and a partner. If you’re having trouble with your decision, the cards suggest that an alliance would be the best course.”

“An alliance, Parrish?” Ronan asks. His mouth quirks up in a grin, and mischief dances in his pale eyes, “Two generals shaking hands across a map table? That’s what the lovers suggest to you?”

Adam feels his cheeks pink, “I told you it’s symbolic. It could be a romantic alliance, or it could be familial, platonic, possibly even pertaining to business.”

“And which does your instinct tell you it is?”

“Romantic,” Adam says shortly, ducking his head to gather up the cards, “But they don’t command you. You may do as you wish.” He can feel Lynch’s eyes on him, weighing, measuring, determining his worth.

“Well,” he says, finally, “Perhaps I shall.” Then he levers himself back to his feet with the aid of the chair, Opal and his walking cane. Adam has a secret suspicion that he takes his time about it on purpose so that Opal can ‘help’. Again, he feels a tug of something, a premonition perhaps, some factor he has overlooked. The cards are warm in his hands. He’s missed something, he’s certain. Adam hates missing things.

Winter had begun to creep into The Barnes by the time Mr Lynch could walk without aid or limp. Amongst the naked trees one glassy morning, over lawns frosted with glimmering ice, Mr Lynch took Adam on a tour of the estate. Adam had not ridden since he left Henrietta, and then rarely with a saddle, but he felt enough confidence in his skill with a horse that he agreed when Lynch suggested they should ride. In the stables, running practiced hands over a bay gelding’s glossy flank, Adam could feel the other man’s eyes on him again, still sizing him up, assessing his merits.

They rode up and down the length of the park, walking their mounts along the fences which divided sweeping lawns from the practical pastures of the farm. The cold was not yet fully upon them, and cows still dotted the green. Lynch pointed out the oldest buildings – some of them listing dangerously to one side, or missing walls, or roofs – the barns for which the property was named.

“Not very inventive, my ancestors,” Lynch told him. He seemed disgruntled by this, or perhaps dryly amused. With him, it was often hard to tell.

“Practical, though. This is good country for cattle.”

“Yes,” Lynch agreed. His eyes, when they roved across the landscape, took on a faraway look, and his breathing grew long and sure. This man who, pacing through the labyrinthine rooms of his manor or dualling with his visitors, was nothing but edges and shadows and teeth, looked peaceful here, on horseback, surrounded by nothing but endless green and distant animals. It was a little unexpected. When they had met, between the crisply tailored black suits and the cropped hair, the sharp way he had with words, Adam had thought Lynch distinctly cosmopolitan. Now he wondered if this was closer to the truth, the man you’d get if you scraped the rest away. He wondered what Lynch would look like in a workman’s shirt and brown wool trousers, a broad hat to keep his neck out of the sun. Good, he thinks. Lynch would look good.

Lost in his reverie, Adam had fallen behind. Noticing it, Lynch wheeled his horse around and, instead of closing the distance between them, shouted at him.

“Parrish! What the hell are you mooning about back there? Hurry up, man. I want to show you the milking sheds.”

Adam was not sure he’d any particular interest in milking sheds. He certainly was not impressed to be shouted and sworn at. But here was the rub, after all. The ever-present itch for freedom which had been lulled by the peace and relative autonomy of his life here before Mr Lynch’s unexpected return has now begun to twitch again. The truth was that Lynch, as his employer, might treat Adam with as much familiarity as he pleased, but Adam was not permitted to return the favour. They were, at root, separated by the same gaping power disparity as any master and his employee, and the burden fell on Adam, always, to maintain it. Still, if he allowed his horse to close the distance rather slower than it might have, nobody would notice.

Lynch noticed. He smiled his sharp smile, all teeth, “Why, Parrish,” he said, “Do my manners displease you?”

Adam bit the inside of his cheek and looked away over the fields, unable, after all, to resist a challenge. “Indeed, Mr. Lynch, I am starting to believe you were raised in one of these barns.”

Lynch grinned his sharp grin. Somewhere deep within Adam, far from consciousness and light, that coil of pregnant discontent twitched, and subtly shifted its direction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First, everyone should have a good dressing gown. I firmly believe this, and so does Sherlock Holmes, so it must be true. Seriously, though, that or a smoking jacket. Indispensable garment.
> 
> Thank you _so much_ to everyone who left a comment on the last chapter, the response really made my day. I'm delighted that people are enjoying this fic, and I love that I get to talk to you all about it.
> 
> ~  
> Next chapter: dreams, forests, unexpected presents and encounters.
> 
> Questions, comments or responses, let 'em at me. Thank you, as ever, for reading.


	6. Bounded by a propitious sky.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sweet dreams, the strange familiar, and a series of mysterious presents.
> 
>  _Adam knows deeply, in the way of dreams, that this is the_ same forest _. It’s hard to explain in logical terms because it is _not_ logical, but if his forest had been broken up and scattered over a much larger area, the new places are parts that might have sprung up in between._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's a bit short, so I'm thinking I might post the next a bit early to make up for it :)
> 
> Anyway, enjoy.

Sometimes, in dreams, Adam walks his forest again.

He knows every branch and hollow, is familiar with every bird. The ground beneath his bare feet is soft and thick with moss. Though Christmas has only recently been and gone and The Barnes lies fallow beneath a thick pall of snow, here, in his woods, a hazy sun shines through the leaves above him, making their green glow.

He loves it here. He feels safe, contented, understood. The trees whisper above his head, and though does not understand the words, he catches their intention. They are welcoming him home, offering him sanctuary, pleased to have him near.

Adam looks down at his hands, and they are just his hands – knobbly knuckles, chapped skin, ungainly, long – but they are also the forest’s hands. These are hands that understand the subtle shift in energies that a broken ring of stones or diverted stream can produce, and feel warmth when the right card lies beneath them.

As if summoned, his cards appear. He shuffles them absently, flipping them between his palms. Death. The seven of cups. The four of wands. Change, choices, beginnings, homecoming. The Knight of swords; that was new. Lynch’s card. Perhaps a hangover from last week’s reading.

Adam frowns. For six months before he found Mrs Sargent’s advertisement, he’d pulled three of those cards over and over. Change. A choice. A new beginning. When he’d received her letter, he’d supposed this chapter closed. Certainly, he had not drawn them again in months. He has consulted the cards less often, though, since Lynch’s arrival. He’s been busy and – he has already admitted it to himself – something like content. No need to go looking for trouble.

And yet, trouble does tend to find him regardless. Adam feels a stone turn beneath his feet and looks down in surprise. There are no stones in his wood. His wood is roots, moss, dark earth. There are pebbles in the creek bed, but not here. The stone by his foot is large and flat-ish, its flecked grey-black surface mottled yellow with lichen. Strange.

Adam looks up and finds more surprises. The trees, so familiar to him in every weather, have changed, though not completely. Here and there he can still see familiar forms: green with moss, thick-trunked, twisty. Now they negotiate space with unfamiliar species’, and much larger specimens. Tall and willowy and lush, grey-green trunks reaching skyward. The ground is still mossy, but there are stones here, covering the ground. He has to watch his feet. The undergrowth is sparse, but as he presses forwards Adam finds larger rocks, then boulders, hunched beneath the trees. He runs a hand over a rockface wonderingly. It feels as real as his forest, real as memory. He picks his way carefully so as not to cut his bare feet.

The other change is that Adam’s ‘forest’ was small. As a child it had felt vast but when he thinks back on it now, he knows it could not have been more than a field across. He had known every malleable inch of it, had wandered every dip and rise. This forest is large; he cannot tell how large, but there are no edges in sight, no sounds of distant voices in fields nearby. He could be anywhere, any wilderness.

But though there are more trees, more parts to this landscape, Adam knows deeply, in the way of dreams, that this is the _same_ _forest_. It’s hard to explain in logical terms because it is _not_ logical, but if his forest had been broken up and scattered over a much larger area, the new places are parts that might have sprung up in between.

It's not until he looks up, searching for a bird calling over his head, that Adam realises he is not alone.

Mr. Lynch stands in the middle of a clearing. A creek runs at his feet, dividing around the wide flat stone upon which he balances. He is dressed as if he had half prepared for sleep, then wandered into the woods instead: soft white shirt, loose at the collar, with his dark trousers broken over pale bare feet. He has laced his hands behind his skull and stands in a patch of sunlight, eyes closed, face uncharacteristically content, up-turned to the sky. Adam dislodges a pebble and Lynch turns slowly on his heel and opens his eyes.

His face registers absolute and vividly realistic surprise.

“Parrish? What are you doing here?”

“What are _you_ doing here?” Adam grumbles, “It’s _my_ forest.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is,” Adam insists, “It’s mine.” He adds nonsensically, “I live here.”

Lynch quirks an eyebrow at him, “You live in a forest?

“Yes.”

“I knew it!” Mr Lynch laughs, and in this place, where Adam has no need of his walls, he smiles back.

“Hold your tongue.”

“Shan’t,” Lynch tells him unrepentantly. Then, “Have you been here long?”

Adam tilts his head back to look at the trees, some old and familiar, some newer but still warm, still reaching out to him. He hears the murmur of their almost-voices in his bad ear.

“All my life. I grew up in this forest. Or parts of it. To be honest, at the time it was more of a wood. It’s grown since my last visit.”

Mr Lynch is looking at him very oddly.

“Grown how?”

He shrugs, “All the old trees are here, but they’re further apart, and there are new things – trees, rocks,” he gestures to the brook that runs, clear and laughing, through this little grassy glade, “Streams. The same, but more.”

“That is very strange indeed, Mr Parrish, because I grew up in this forest, too, and it also has changed.”

“Perhaps our forests have merged, become one.”

A crooked smile pulls at one corner of Mr Lynch’s mouth.

“What is it?” Adam asks.

“Nothing. Only, sometimes, Mr Parrish, I find it quite it is quite hard to credit your unworldliness. I know you to be so, and yet.”

Adam scowls at him – because in a dream, one is allowed to be rude to one’s employer, should they deserve it – feeling stung. “I may not be as… _well travelled_ as you, but I assure you I am not the innocent for which you have mistaken me.”

Lynch tilts his head in that way which always makes him uncannily resemble his raven.

“There are many different types of innocence, Mr. Parrish. Though I see, now, that some have indeed been stolen from you, perhaps you should not be so eager to dispose of the rest.”

The strangeness of this advice, the way it hints at knowledge Adam has no wish to share, unsettles him. He looks away, down the shimmering curve of the stream, to where the water rushes from a crack in a great boulder, impossibly split down the centre. He feels ruffled, warm in an uncomfortable way distinct from the pleasant touch of dappled sun, and somehow irritated. Because Mr Lynch has made an assumption about him? Or because he has gotten it wrong? Or, in one way, right? Lynch’s un-knowing-knowing feels jarring, somehow. It rubs the wrong way against his skin.

“Often,” Adam says, “People say ‘innocence’ when what they mean is a type of acceptable, or socially beneficial, ignorance. I have striven all my life away from ignorance, Mr. Lynch. I do not intend to stop now. There are, I am sure, a great many things in this world that I do not yet know. But I intend to find them out and master them.” He glances back in time to see Lynch swallow.

“Mr Parrish, I believe you are the sort of person who might do anything, with sufficient determination. If you want to know the world, I have no doubt that you will.” He grins suddenly, wolfishly, and the mood breaks, “I can only _hope_ that you will –”

And then Adam wakes up to dawn and an infernal clattering, and when he goes to his window he finds Bonesaw there, on the sill, trying to get in.

Adam lifts the sash, puts on his dressing gown, and takes her with him down to breakfast. He does not see Mr Lynch all day.

Someone has taken to leaving him gifts. At first, Adam suspects Opal, but as her presents tend more towards natural objects – and, on more than one unfortunate occasion, live ones – he dismisses this quickly. The other candidate is both obvious and perplexing. Adam has never before been employed by a wealthy, enigmatic and eccentric country gentlemen; he cannot be _certain_ that this is not standard practice, but he suspects most rich men do not leave presents lying about for their employees. It puzzles him deeply.

And yet Mr Lynch leaves these gifts so casually that Adam cannot feel upset by them. They’re never things that he _needs_ , per say, and so receiving them does not prick at his pride. But they are…thoughtful, exposing further that unexpected vein of sweetness hitherto applied only to Opal. To find himself added to this exclusive club contributes much to Adam’s confusion. Often, the presents pertain to something one of them has mentioned so briefly in conversation that when he stumbles across the thing days later Adam must pause a moment to decipher its context.

One morning, coming into the schoolroom to set up the lessons of the day, he finds a small glass jar upon his desk. Inside it is a white ointment which smells of The Barnes and, he realises with a start, his dream forest: moss, and mist, green things growing. On its base is a label reading only _manibus_ , in Lynch’s scratchy hand. Adam glances at his raw, winter-cracked knuckles and frowns.

Another day he sits down at the table in the library which he has claimed as his own particular workspace, and discovers a beautifully bound copy of _The Histories **[1]**. _This is an unusually unsubtle nod to a rousing and thoroughly enjoyable argument in which he and Ronan have, for some weeks now, been engaged.

And one afternoon, when Ronan has taken Opal off to the back fields in pursuit of some errant goats, Adam sits down at the piano in the informal music room to amuse himself and finds a sheaf of unfamiliar pages on the stand. He opens the folio and discovers passages far too complex for Opal’s learning fingers to fumble through. Perhaps Lynch bought it for himself, but Adam has only ever seen him at the fiddle or, once, the great harp which stands, solemn and dusty, in one corner of the room. In the whole house nobody else, to Adam’s knowledge, has the skill to play this music. Nobody but he. He sets his fingers to the keys and wonders what Lynch is about.

[1] By Herodotus, ‘father of lies’. You can see why Ronan would enjoy fighting about this book, I think.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you as ever for the lovely comments and the kudos, they make me sooooo happy. And thank you also to the people who subscribe and bookmark. I appreciate you all.
> 
> Next chapter is one of my favourites, and I'm going to post it a little early in part to make up for this short one, but also because I just...want to share it, I guess. Is that silly? I'm really enjoying this writing-then-getting-feedback-from-live-humans thing. I'm impatient to see what you all think.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this part (despite its brevity), and I look forward to any comments or questions.
> 
> ~  
> Next up: _here there be monsters._


	7. I must keep in good health, and not die.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Secrets, blood and midnight meetings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for canon-level violence and horror.
> 
> _Suddenly, with all the terrified conviction of a dream, Adam is certain that there is_ something on the other side of that door.

Adam feels it in the delicate hairs rising at his nape: a whisper of something wrong, of danger close, propelling him fast out of sleep. For a moment he lies perfectly still in his bed, barely breathing, gathering information to him like a cloak. Nothing in his room. Nothing at his window. No footsteps in the corridor. No voices on the stairs.

Then he hears it.

_Rattlllllle-click._

He holds himself so still he doesn’t blink.

_Click-shuuuuuuush-click_.

A weird sound, soft and dragging, like someone pulling a sack of bones across a rug. He’s never heard it before.

_Shuuuuuuuush-shush. Click. Click._

Adam pushes himself slowly vertical, bedclothes pooling at his waist. The sound is muffled. It’s not in the hallway.

A servant, perhaps? But the servants sleep in the south wing. Only two rooms are occupied in this part of the house. His, and –

_Lynch_.

With the practiced quiet of childhood necessity, Adam is out of bed and at the door, pulling on his dressing gown over his thin nightshirt and belting it tight. He presses his ear against the wood.

There.

The sound again.

The skitter of something over polished boards and then that dragging noise, slow, a muffled rattle. Something about it turns his stomach over and makes his knees feel strange.

It certainly isn’t in the hallway, and though Adam’s lone working ear cannot pinpoint a direction, there’s only one other bedroom within earshot.

Plucking a candle from his nightstand, he eases the door open and slips out.

The corridor is still, a single lamp burning in the sconce by the stairs. Adam lights his candle and, moving soft, makes for the door at the far end of the hall.

All is silent when he reaches it, and embarrassment floods him in a rush – a nightmare, a waking dream. He is being absurd. He turns quickly on his heel and –

_Clickclickclickclickclick_.

It’s just inside the door. His breath is loud in his ear and he holds it quickly, willing silence. But the breath is _still loud in his ear_.

Suddenly, with all the terrified conviction of a dream, Adam is certain that there is _something on the other side of that door_. Something large. Something which is absolutely – and there is no logical way he can know this but that _he knows_ – not Lynch. Lynch is probably sleeping at this very moment, dreaming between his sheets while some _thing_ click-drags across his rug. A primal shudder runs down Adam’s spine. All he has is his flickering candle. But he knows, he _knows_ , that he must go through the door.

For a terrible moment when his hand closes on the knob it occurs to him that the door might be bolted. But it isn’t. The mechanism turns smoothly and Adam, suddenly reckless or perhaps even brave, flings the door violently open.

On the pale blue silk rug stands –

An oil slick.

A black bird.

An oozing wyrm.

An enormous bat.

A snake with too many teeth.

A scaled, flapping, writhing mass of coiling limbs and gnashing – limbs and –

_Lynch_.

Jesus Christ. It has teeth in its hands. It has teeth in its fingers. Its fingers are scaled and its wings snap out and back, out and back, drag-clacking across the floor like leather sacks of dry, broken sticks. Its many, many mouths are drooling black ooze onto the priceless silk rug.

“Lynch.” Adam manages. Then, as the beast begins to turn slowly – presumably towards him, but who can tell? Where are its eyes? Where is its face? So many teeth and mouths and not a single face amongst them – louder, “ _Lynch!_ ”

Adam can see him, now. A still figure on the bed. Limp as the newly dead, _Oh god_. There’s no blood that he can make out, but the room is dim, there could be. Perhaps he’s too late. Perhaps he waited too long, cowering in his bed, and now –

“Lynch,” he tries again, “Goddamn you Lynch, get up. Get _up_!”

Adam has to make a choice. The nightmare creature has definitely ‘seen’ him now. Its many skittering feet chitter and rustle across the pile. It is seven feet tall and full of teeth and all he has is a candle and the cord of his dressing gown. If he drops the candle, the whole house could burn. He peers into Lynch’s room. There’s a chair near the door, a walking stick, a vase. The creature is ten feet away. Nine. Adam makes a decision. He blows out the candle and throws it at the beast while he flings himself in the opposite direction, grabbing for the cane. In the gloom he is almost blind, the creature just another shadow amongst shadows, barely backlit against the lamp turned low. When Adam turns, stick in hand, it is nearly upon him. He braces his feet and holds the stick like a club, grits his teeth.

He never did learn to fight.

“ _Lynch_ ,” he shouts, “Wake the hell up, god _damn_ you!”

He swings the cane with all his strength.

There is a sick, wet sound like a green stick cracking, and for a moment Adam thinks it _is_ his stick and this will be over sooner even than he’d feared. But then the creature makes an ungodly, horrifying sound like a keen or a gurgle or a cut-throat gasp and he feels something give under his weight. If he experiences any relief, it’s gone too soon to tell. The thing hisses at him and Adam feels something smooth and pointed brush his arm – scales, teeth – there is a rank stench like river-soaked clothes left to moulder. A wave of hot breath assails him, as from many small mouths. He bites back his fear and swings again.

The creature staggers. Adam knows this because his eyes have adjusted to the gloom. For a moment, he thinks it must have been a lucky shot, but then the creature staggers again to one side and growls around to face – Lynch. His white shirt sweat-soaked and open at the collar, feet bare below his black trousers.

“Look at me, you ugly bastard,” he snarls, and swings again. He is holding a brass urn, heavy and ornate, and it connects with a solid crunch. The creature recoils, backing across the room towards the window, and without speaking Adam and Lynch advance in tandem. They keep a space between them, flanking the creature.

Although it has been injured, it is not afraid. It lashes out with many-mouthed limbs, sweeping letters from the sideboard, ink bottles flying, and Adam lands a solid blow with his cane. One wing crumples. Lynch darts forward and swings at it, and it rears back and overturns the little escritoire and chair. Adam parries from the right, Lynch harangues it from the left. There’s nowhere for it to go, but their weapons are not efficient. The beast stabs a pillow, Lynch swears. It sheds scales and gore and teeth when they make contact, but it is learning them, too, just as much as they are learning it. It shies away from their blows, flinching, folding.

And then, suddenly, _lunging_.

Lynch’s brass urn is certainly the more forceful weapon, but it also puts him at the mercy of his own reach. As he lands a crushing blow on what might be a shoulder, the beast screams and dives forwards, latching onto him with one of its many terrible round mouths. Lynch shouts, curses, blood soaking quickly through his shirt, and Adam darts in without thinking, thrusting hard enough to knock the beast off-balance. There is a mound of dirty linen by the window. The creature shrieks as it trips and overbalances, toppling backwards, clawing at the heavy velvet curtain to slow its fall.

In a moment, Lynch is on it again, heedless of teeth and the roiling mass of arms. He brings the urn down heavily once, again, again. Thin black gore spatters his white shirt, his face, his hands. The creature is convulsing beneath him, mouths gaping, questing, gasping. Adam cannot begin to untangle or describe the horror he feels at this moment. It is inarticulable. Unimaginable. His insides feel hollowed out and frozen over.

There is a last sickening crunch, and the wings judder and collapse. Lynch swears fluently, fluidly, in English, French, Latin, Italian, possibly Greek. The curses gradually lengthen, bleeding into each other thickly like his tongue is slowing down, stopping up. Adam watches, dazed, as Lynch claps a hand over his own mouth and retches for a second, dryly, before dropping the urn into the linen pile with a muffled thud and leaning forward to rest his hands upon his knees. He reaches blindly for the ruined curtain and uses the underside to wipe black fluids from his face and neck and arms and hands.

Into the silence, Adam swallows, and it is unintentionally loud. He sees Lynch go perfectly still.

“Shut the door,” Lynch says, quietly.

Adam blinks for a moment at his back, then does as he says. He returns the stick, its lacquer scratched and dented, to its stand. He does not know, at all, what to do next.

“You weren’t supposed to be here.”

Adam lifts his head slowly. He feels dazed, slow, “What?”

“In this part of the house. We never put guests here. Mrs Sargent gave you the room while I was away because it was more convenient, and in all the fuss – the accident, Declan – she must have forgotten to have you moved. You weren’t supposed to be here. I’m sorry. You should never have had to see that.”

“What…what _was_ it?”

“A nightmare,” Lynch answers immediately; and then, slower, as though trying out the words to find the most convincing iteration, “A monster. A ghost story.”

“That,” says Adam firmly, “Was not a ghost.”

“Oh?” Lynch asks, glancing back over his shoulder and meeting Adam’s eyes for the first time, “Expert, are you?”

“I’m fairly certain ghosts are supposed to be less corporeal.”

Lynch shrugs, and turns to pick his way back through the wreckage and towards Adam. “And have fewer teeth, I’d imagine.”

“I’d imagine so.”

“Are you alright?”

Adam looks down at himself. His dressing gown is spattered with sticky black gore. It’s seeped into the sleeves like ink, and more of it paints his bare feet, his wrists.

“Wash your face and hands, go on. There’s water in the jug.”

Adam looks at his face in the mirror above the wash stand. There is a black smudge above one eyebrow. He pours water into the bowl and wets a clean cloth, scrubbing at his hands and fingernails, splashing his face.

“I think my dressing gown is ruined.” His voice sounds flat in his ear.

“I’ll get you a new one. You’re certain you’re unharmed?”

“I’m certain. Lynch.”

“Parrish?”

Adam feels abandoned by the English language. _Poor thing_ , he thinks, _It was not designed for this_.

“Parrish,” Lynch says again. He’s closer now. His pale face appears in the mirror over Adam’s shoulder, and Adam lets out a slow, shuddering breath. Lynch puts a hand on his shoulder, gives him a gentle shake and then sooths it away with his thumb. “It’s alright, Parrish. We’re alright. Do you want your explanation now, or would you like to go back to bed first? It must be near three in the morning. Get some sleep and I’ll – I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. You look dead on your feet.”

“Too kind,” Adam says reflexively. Then, “Lynch...” It wavers. More firmly, “Lynch.”

In the mirror, Lynch inclines his head. He presses Adam’s shoulder, and Adam lets the weight of his hand ground him, persuade him that this is real.

“A nightmare?” Adam asks, softly.

“Yes.”

“You mean…literally.”

“Quite literally, yes.”

“I –” Adam passes his hand over his eyes, presses in at the sockets with fingers and thumb, “You’ll explain it in the morning.”

Lynch’s fingers touch his neck, “I promise.”

“Yes.” Adam tells himself, “Yes. Alright. Bed.” It occurs to him that Lynch’s bed is covered in feathers and ichor. There is a monster, felled, at its side.

“What are you going to do?” he asks, already turning around, “You can’t – Jesus Christ, Lynch – are you hurt?”

Adam reaches for him without thinking, just pushing the collar of his shirt aside before the other man winces away from him, “It’s nothing, I’m –” Adam’s hand shines sickly slick in the lamplight. They both stare at it. This time when he shoves roughly into Lynch’s space, he does not resist, “Fuck,” he mutters, craning to try to see his own shoulder, “Bleeding, dammit. How are you at stitches, Parrish?”

“Well, I taught at a boy’s school,” Adam tells him, laying one hand gently on the side of Lynch’s neck to keep him still and feeling the pulse there jump at his fingers. With the other hand he moves the collar gingerly aside again, revealing a ring of bloody punctures. How had he forgotten the bite? It seems hours since he watched the creature strike, red blooming on white linen, “So I can sew my own buttons. But I’m not sure that’s what’s wanted here. Jesus, Lynch. It’s not poisonous, is it?”

Lynch, who is holding himself very still beneath Adam’s hands, pales visibly. “Fucking Christ, _I_ don’t know. I hope not.”

Adam looks up at him. He is trying to think – he is trying _not_ to think – he is trying to think. He rubs his thumb absently over a place where black ichor has splashed the stubbled skin below Lynch’s jaw, and registers the other man’s throat moving as he swallows.

“I need to clean this,” Adam tells him, “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

“I don’t think so,” dark eyelashes trace a soft arc as Lynch looks down at him, a glacial scan of his person which pricks gooseflesh up on Adam’s nape, “Are you?” he asks again.

“No,” Adam says, though his breath is still ragged and loud, “I think I’m intact.” He takes another slow breath, resettles his shoulders and wills his mind to come back together, “Water. And spirits of some kind – I assume you have both in this pigsty, somewhere.” He draws away from Lynch to scan the chamber. The short laugh behind him is brittle and sharp-edged.

“Try the last drawer in the dresser. Clean linen on the washstand.”

Adam hears Lynch picking through the room behind him as he gathers his supplies. A rustle of fabric, the faint creak of shifting furniture. When he turns back Lynch is sitting on the edge of his bed, shirt crumpled at his feet. Adam is momentarily distracted by the pale expanse of his bare skin, the dark claw of a tattoo catching at his throat and the darker shadow of hair painting his chest and trailing down from his navel. But Lynch is also cursing, viciously, softly, and craning his head at a painful angle to try to get a look at the bite.

“Stop that,” Adam tells him, flicking his ear as he bends to set the jug and basin on the floor by Lynch’s feet, “Drink this. Perhaps it’ll help you to hold still.”

Lynch takes the bottle from him and tugs the cork free with his teeth. It is only when Adam takes it back that he notices how his own hands are shaking. He stares at them. His rough, boyish knuckles curl around the bottle’s neck, trembling fit to make waves. Black gore still rims his fingernails, though he’d done his best to wipe it off.

Warm fingers close over his; Lynch’s hands cup the bottle, steadying it, pressing heat and reality back into his skin. Adam raises his eyes to find Lynch already looking at him.

“Parrish,” he says softly. And then, out of the blue, enough to make Adam’s breath hitch, “Adam. Are you alright? I can manage myself, if – ”

“No – no, I’m fine. I can do it.” Adam flexes his fingers against the prison of Lynch’s hands, feels them give gently, instantly. One lingering press and they fall away. Adam misses them for a moment.

“Tilt your head,” he tells Lynch softly, and then, when he bends forwards, “No, this way,” turning his jaw away with the lightest touch. Lynch’s pale eyes slide sideways to find his again, and Adam holds them for a second before spreading his fingers around the bite, holding the skin taught. Lynch hisses softly. “Sorry,” Adam warns him, “This will sting.”

He washes the wound as gently as he is able, pats it dry with fresh linen. It bleeds, sluggish but fresh, and Adam hopes it will not fester. He’s seen dog bites before, and they almost always go bad, but no dog had done this. The puncture wounds are round and deep, like impossibly thick needles or the teeth on Opal’s mask, but the incisions are precise, no tearing. Lynch would have to keep it clean, but they can hope.

“How attached are you to this shirt?” Adam asks, and Lynch, who had been drifting in a half-daze, blinks up at him slowly. Adam brushes his skin again, gently, at the join of shoulder and neck, and feels him shudder. This is where the pain comes, Adam thinks, washing in as the last of the fight drains out. “Your shirt?” he repeats, “For bandages. It’s ruined anyway.”

“Oh. Of course.” Lynch sways a little beneath his hand, “Have at.”

Adam folds a wad of fresh handkerchiefs to press against the wound, and winds unstained strips of Lynch’s shirt around his chest and under his arm to hold it in place.

“You’re cold,” he notes, bending to gather the detritus of his makeshift doctoring, “I’ll get you a new shirt.” A hand snags in the pocket of his dressing gown, and he nudges it gently free with his hip, “Patience, Lynch. A minute.”

Only as he is washing his bloody hands in the basin, wondering what to do with the pile of ruddy linens, does Adam truly register the chaos of the room. Somehow, in the whirl of fear, of fighting, fear again when he saw the blood on Lynch’s shoulder, then the familiar relief of dedicating himself to a task, he had overlooked the turmoil around them. Greasy black scales litter the floor, liberally washed with the same thin, glistening black gore that stains the cuffs of his dressing gown and the soles of his bare feet. The delicate writing desk and chair are overturned, and a savage gash has undone one pillow and blanketed the far corner in a drift of white feathers. From where he stands, by the washstand, Adam can’t see the monster; but when he looks over his shoulder in the mirror his eyes find the deep rent in the velvet curtains that had marked its final, clawing descent. He remembers the foul stink of it, the heat of its breath on his skin. He shudders involuntarily. Lynch cannot possibly sleep here, with that thing crumpled in the corner like a sack of old bones and bile and snakeskins. It is intolerable even to contemplate.

Recalling himself to his task, Adam digs in the dresser for a nightshirt and turns back to the bed.

Lynch has not moved except to crumple forwards. His head hangs low, almost between his knees, and his wiry arms are wrapped tight around his body. He rocks, sluggishly, like a child, back and forth, rhythmic and unsettling, painful for Adam to watch.

Adam crosses the room slowly, as though approaching Bonesaw or Misrule. When he reaches the bed he stops, the instinct to reach out warring with his higher judgement. With his head bent forward, Adam can see the vulnerable nape of Lynch’s neck and, for the first time, the spread of ink across his shoulders and spine.

“Lynch,” he says, softly, “Lynch, look at me.”

Lynch shudders like a spooked horse and Adam’s rational mind, what little of it he has left after this nightmare stretch, gives in with a sigh. A terrible tenderness reverberates through him as he reaches out to touch, so carefully, his fingers to the close-cropped scalp. Lynch makes a damp, halting noise low in his throat, and Adam slides his palm more fully over the thin plates of his skull, feels him press faintly back.

“Are you…” but he does not know what to ask.

A wet laugh rumbles up from Lynch’s chest, and he pushes his head more firmly into Adam’s hand, guiding his fingers, cat-like, to find the delicate slope of one ear, the vulnerable nape of his neck.

“I’m alive,” Lynch whispers, “You’re alive. That’s two in the black column that I had not expected.”

Adam’s fingers tense without his say-so on the back of Lynch’s neck, and Lynch catches in a sharp breath.

“You thought the beast would kill you.”

“Well, they’ve tried before.”

“ _Lynch_ –”

“Ronan,” Lynch says quietly. His breath brushes warm against Adam’s stomach, and Adam is suddenly aware, in a way he has never been before, of the thinness of his nightshirt.

“What?”

“Ronan. Surely after fighting a monster and patching my wounds, we are intimate enough to be on a first name basis.”

“Ronan.”

“Yes?”

“No, I mean.”

Ronan laughs again. Not quite as wet this time. He turns his head beneath Adam’s hand until his breath touches the unguarded skin of his wrist. Looking down at him, Adam finds those strange, pale eyes already looking back. Carefully, deliberately, watching him throughout, Ronan presses his mouth to Adam’s flesh.

Adam jumps a foot in the air, dropping the shirt and pulling his hands to his sides.

For a moment time ceases. Ronan remains on the bed, head turned still to the side, and their eyes are locked over the intervening space. Then he breaks the tableaux with precise movements: straightens his head, then his shoulders, then his back. Swoops down to collect the fresh shirt and in one smooth movement, wincing only slightly as the wound on his shoulder distorts, stands, pulling on the garment, and steps away from the bed. And from Adam.

“You should go.” Ronan says; except that he is Mr. Lynch again, Master Lynch, cool and distant and polite. Nothing like the _Lynch_ Adam knows. “You’ve done very well, Mr. Parrish. A good man to have in a tight spot.” He is righting furniture, kicking the gory rug into a pile, “Back to bed, now. The men will help me with this in the morning.”

Past Ronan’s shoulder, Adam can see the torn curtain. Knows what lies, ruined and bloody, in its crumpled foothills.

“God, Lynch, you can’t sleep here.”

“Oh, I doubt I’ll do any more sleeping for a while.” His grin is sharp, but it lacks its usual wickedness. Instead, Adam tastes something bitter on his throat. His wrist feels hot. The skin there tingles.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Out, Parrish.”

“Lynch. _Ronan_ –”

“ _Out! Parrish_.”

It’s the first time Lynch has ever raised his voice to Adam. It’s the first time, in a long time, that anybody has. He is surprised, yet not surprised, to find that this time, from this man, the effect is completely unfamiliar.

“As you please,” Adam says. He is not afraid. Instead he feels cold, distant, a perfect match for Mr Ronan fucking Lynch. The door does not slam as he stalks out of the room. Behind him, as his hand leaves the knob, he hears the hollow crash of porcelain vessels hitting the ground. He does not turn back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...if I were picking favourites, this chapter would be one of mine. Are you supposed to admit that sort of thing? I hope you lot like it, too.
> 
> Please tell me what you think - as ever, your comments make my day :)
> 
> ~  
> Next chapter: truce and explanations.


	8. And as they grow they will lean towards you.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Improbable explanations, potential explosions.
> 
> _“Do you have questions?” Ronan asked, “Or would you like me to begin?”_
> 
> _Adam gave this due consideration, “To be frank, I do not know where I would start. Tell me, and I will ask for clarification as required.”_
> 
> _“Of course you bloody will. Very well. You already know the heart of my secret.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We return to our usual schedule.

In anyone else, Adam might have expected the previous night’s fraught ending to eclipse its earlier promises; but Ronan Lynch was not anyone else, and though there were few things he held truly sacred, promises were one of them. He found Adam late that afternoon, once lessons were done and he and Opal were strolling in the garden, not really talking, just enjoying the first hints of spring’s approaching warmth.

“Sprog,” Ronan greeted Opal, then removed closed fists from his pockets and hid them ostentatiously behind his back, “Left or right?”

Opal’s small face screwed up in a moment of serious contemplation. With the dignity and pomp of a ruler sending troops to war, she extended her hand to his left.

“Wise choice,” Ronan told her, and produced a tiny clockwork bird which hummed gently to life as soon as his fingers opened around it. Adam was no less enraptured than his pupil as it ruffled blue-enamelled feathers and peered up at Opal from one crystal eye. He itched for a closer look. Ronan tipped the bird unceremoniously into Opal’s hand, “Now take your bauble and go play in the woods a while, I must speak with Mr Parrish.”

Ordinarily Opal, like all precocious children, would have been offended by this inference that there were discussions from which her age precluded her. But the gift was a good one and, tossing the small bird skyward with a delighted laugh, she followed its swooping path towards the forest.

The two men stood awkwardly for a minute. Without Opal to make up the third side of their triangle, they now seemed both too close for comfort, and too far for easy conversation.

Lynch, more used than Adam to breaking things for his own convenience, ended the détente.

“Walk with me.”

He set off briskly towards the formal garden, and Adam had to jog a few paces to join him again.

“Do you have questions?” Ronan asked, “Or would you like me to begin?”

Adam gave this due consideration, “To be frank, I do not know where I would start. Tell me, and I will ask for clarification as required.”

“Of course you bloody will. Very well. You already know the heart of my secret.” Adam frowned at him instead of pointing out that this was obviously untrue. Ronan laughed his mirthless laugh, “Then you really were out of sorts last night, Parrish. I told you to your face. You asked what the creature was and I did not dissemble. It was exactly what it seemed to be: a nightmare.”

“Well I know _that_ ,” Adam snapped. _So much for kept promises_ , he thought, _I’d prefer silence to being run about_. “Of course it was a nightmare. It was monstrous. I feel…ill, just thinking about it. I think I’ll remember that night as long as I live. But that doesn’t explain the beast’s existence in the first place.”

“But it does,” Ronan insisted, pausing Adam with a hand on his arm. “Poor dear Parrish,” Adam scowled, sensing mockery to come, “I doubt anybody has ever said this to you before, but just this once you could stand to be _more_ literal. When I say ‘nightmare’ I am not being metaphorical. You are a man of reason and science. You know as well as I that that creature last night had no place in the natural order of things. A beast like that has no cause to exist. In nature, it is impossible, which is why it should be obvious to you that nature did not beget it. Extend the argument, Adam. If not nature…?”

“A nightmare,” Adam repeated. His breath felt caught in his lungs, a weight he could not release, “It came from somewhere outside of the natural world? Super-natural?”

“You might describe it that way, I suppose,” here, Lynch sounded bitter, “Others have certainly termed me unnatural before.”

“You?” Adam asked, feeling slow. There was a key piece here which he was still avoiding. He could sense it in his mind, a truth too impossible to address head-on, “I said nothing about you.”

“Adam,” Lynch said again, and Adam felt a strange weightlessness when he spoke his name. When Lynch said it, it seemed to contain things Adam was not yet able to clearly see; or perhaps it was just the novelty of hearing his given name aloud. He had been boy, and then Parrish, and then Mr Parrish only, for so long.

“A nightmare,” Ronan gazed at him steadfastly, standing just out of arm’s reach. He gave a small, precise nod. “Not a metaphor, but a description.” Another nod. And where do nightmares come from, Adam? “It was _your_ nightmare,” Adam realised, and Lynch let out a breath like a hot air balloon freed from its moorings.

“Now he understands,” he quipped, with a lightness which Adam suspected rang false for both of them.

“But that’s –”

“No,” Ronan interrupted him smoothly, “Obviously, it isn’t. Ask a real question.”

“Alright, _how_?”

Ronan huffed, frustrated, “That’s the one sodding thing I _don’t_ know. Alright,” he waved impatiently at Adam, “ _One of_ many, but I can’t answer you. I don’t bloody understand how it works. Nobody does.”

“Well, then, are there others? Is this…” he couldn’t really credit it, but, “Common?”

“No,” Ronan laughed, turned, and began walking again, back the way they’d come towards the flower gardens and the forest. A dubious look passed over his face, “No,” he repeated slowly, “Well, I don’t believe so. I’ve only met two others like me, and one was my father.”

“Oh,” Adam said. Because that explained…something. Some things, he thought, though at that moment he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what. “One of your brothers?”

“No.”

“And,” Adam paused again, biting at his lip. Last night was still a tangled mess of ungovernable, roiling emotions. He couldn’t bear to look closely at it yet. He’d had to bury it somewhere deep in his mind just to close his eyes again when he returned to his room, and his sleep, such as it was, had been fitful. He kept picturing that long, ragged, glistening shape looming over Lynch’s lifeless body on the bed. The drip of black fluids onto pale skin, the ruddy pile of stained linens. The terrible way Lynch had hunched in upon himself, small as a child, and the look on his face as he had turned his head, breath sending sparks shivering up the inside of Adam’s wrist. It was too much. All of it. He couldn’t manage it right now. But he had to ask, “Is it always like that?”

“Like last night? Thank fucking God, no. Usually they’re…benign. Objects, mostly. Well, Mrs Sargent says you’ve seen the third floor of the western wing. They’re hard to get rid of. Impossible to explain, you understand. Things that shouldn’t work the way they do – that bird, for instance, God only knows what it looks like inside – no real clockwork could do that. But for the most part, like any dream, they are only strange. Sometimes,” he darted a tiny smile in Adam’s direction, and nodded his chin at the flowerbed beside him, “They’re even quite beautiful.”

Adam glanced down and stopped, suddenly, because _of course_. One of Lynch’s impossible flowers bloomed at his feet, a riot of reds and deep bloody purples. Unlikely petals curved in towards a golden heart. _Beautiful_ , and completely alien to nature.

“You dream of flowers?” he asked, unable to contain his smile. Ronan Lynch: brawler, bastard, inveterate horse-racer and scamp, goes to sleep and dreams of impractical, devastating wonders that come real in his waking hands. Because of course he does.

Ronan ducked his shoulders, looking embarrassed, “Fruit, too. I try for practical things, sometimes. It doesn’t always work. My control over what I bring back leaves something to be desired,” his mood darkened again, “As you may have inferred.”

 _Too many mouths_ , Adam thought, and shuddered beneath the late afternoon sun, _too many teeth_.

“How is your shoulder?” he asked, wary of a repeat blow up but unable to help himself.

“I’ve had worse,” Ronan said this as though it should be reassuring. And then, “Adam.” So they really were doing this, the given-name thing, or at least Ronan was. Adam wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Every time Lynch said it, it tugged at the lid of some internal box, and perhaps more than one, threatening to spill contents Adam was not yet ready to see. “I am so sorry you had to witness that. I cannot imagine…you must have thought you were dreaming. You handled it very well. Better than I would have, I think, in your situation.”

Adam laughed at that, “I doubt that very much. I’ve never once seen you back down from a fight, Lynch.”

“Fighting, yes. But nightmares…what should we fear if not those?”

He had a point. “The staff,” Adam said, thinking again of the ruin of Lynch’s room. His mind skittered away from the dark form crumpled at the foot of the curtains, “They know?”

“Some of them. They know enough.”

“And Opal?”

“Oh, she knows, but please don’t tell her about last night. I’d prefer not to give her any new nightmares.”

Adam nodded. Of course.

“Aren’t you going to ask me why?” Lynch asked, suddenly.

“‘Why’ what?”

“Why I shared my great secret with a ten-year-old child.”

Adam felt a little stupid, but he was so used to Opal’s odd intelligence, her wisdom sometimes about strange things far beyond her years, that he honestly had not considered it.

“Go on, then.” He said, “Tell me.”

“Opal knows about my dreams,” Ronan told him, “Because she was born in them.”

Adam was conscious of being very carefully watched as he processed this.

“Opal is a dream creature?” In fact, it did explain certain things, like the bizarre eating habits she was ever less adept at disguising.

“Yes.”

“Why?” Adam asked, because frankly not one in a thousand young men in Lynch’s situation would have adopted the orphaned waif he had first claimed Opal to be, let alone invented her. Certainly, Adam could not imagine Ronan – particularly not the Ronan of the past, of whom Mrs Sargent had so studiously avoided description that the void shape she delineated was quite damning on its own – deciding to become a parent. It must have meant a serious upheaval of his previous lifestyle. And yet, though Ronan was not, perhaps, what would most readily come to mind under the heading ‘father,’ it was abundantly clear that he took his duties seriously.

“The honest answer is that ‘why’ does not come into it,” Ronan said. They were walking by the flower garden, and the scent of blooming roses and lilies – not to mention the strange perfumes of Lynch’s impossible collection – was heady around them. Ronan stopped by the reflecting pool. He tipped his head back and closed his eyes, and Adam took the moment to watch him unobserved: the sharp, spare lines of his face, the opulent contrast of his long black lashes. “I didn’t mean to bring her back,” Ronan said softly, “When I say she was born in my dreams, I mean she lived there, all my life, until I was almost twenty. I did not intend to bring her here, but at the time my mind was less paradisiacal even than it is today,” an unhappy smile bent his mouth, “And she begged to come. It was quite a fucking adjustment, I can tell you. Figuring out the boots alone took –” he blinked suddenly, returning his gaze to Adam – who, nearly caught in his staring, felt his ears flush dangerously as he turned away – then bellowed, abruptly enough to startle a bird out of the garden bed beside them, “ _OPAL!_ ”

In a moment Adam heard the fast patter of her small feet and Opal, in a movement wholly unsuited to an elegant young lady yet perfectly, endearingly herself, ricocheted out of the forest and towards Ronan. He made no motion to avoid collision, until the last moment when he sidestepped, neatly, and instead swooped down to lift her at the waist and twirl her about him in a wide circle. Opal cackled, birdlike and delighted, and Ronan glowered up at her without heat. “You’re a menace,” he told her, depositing her lightly on the stone bench by the pool, “Take off your shoes and stockings and show Adam what you can really do.”

Adam watched, bemused and then amazed, as Opal, lacking all sense of propriety and self-consciousness – much like her parental figure – hitched up her skirt to unbutton her thick stockings from her drawers and revealed, as she shoved them off with evident delight, not human legs but the spindly, impossible grey-furred limbs of a faun. Her stockings had evidently been padded to resemble human legs; the boots she shucked were internally odd in a way that bent the mind and the laws of physics, and necessarily so because how else could one cram delicate and perfect hooves into a young girl’s narrow-laced footwear?

Opal stood before him, grinning like mad, and for the first time, Adam knew – felt, really, in the gut-deep, true way he had once felt safe in his forest. In the way the _tarot_ cards had told him true that _here, this_ was the advertisement to answer – that he saw her clearly for the first time. Opal was not a little girl. Or rather, she was not _only_ a little girl. Standing poised like a deer, her dark curls in disarray from running, black eyes huge, brown cheeks flushed pink with a mixture of delight and apprehension, she regarded him with a wild and knowing gaze. Adam sensed that his reaction to this revelation would have deep, long-standing consequences for the course of his life. Perhaps deeper, even, than his response to Ronan’s initial confession, for to accept that a man sometimes gave life to nightmares was somehow less awe-inspiring than the realisation that he could also create…this. Inventive, intelligent, wild _life_. A real flesh-and-blood being, with thoughts, desires, interests and peeves of her own.

“Well, damn,” Adam said, knowing that the illicit word would delight her. It did, “I’d wager you’re even faster with those shoes off.”

It was the right thing to say. Opal flung herself at him, and when she wriggled to be let down she loosed a victory cry like some wild bird – a raven, surely – and took off across the lawn at impossible speed. Adam looked up to find Ronan already gazing at him. He wore a small, fierce, true smile, still sharp but with warmth enough behind it to burn himself on without care, and Adam knew that whatever had gone wrong between them last night – and he still was not entirely sure – he was now forgiven.

“Your mind,” Adam told him seriously, “Is a wonder.”

Ronan ducked his head, ears staining pink.

Being forgiven – for precisely what Adam was still unsure – did not mean that things returned to the easy, warm camaraderie they had previously enjoyed. Adam had not properly noticed _how_ easy and warm he and Lynch were together until they weren’t. Now, things were stilted often, and many a conversation was ended, or room exited, abruptly. In Lynch’s company Adam now found himself surrounded by a perimeter of space which had previously been breached without his noticing. It should not have bothered him – he, who had been so long alone – and yet he felt cold inside of it, and disliked it intensely.

Opal, of course, had no such compunctions, and crossed personal and spatial boundaries with affection and enthusiasm. Her careless physicality made Lynch’s abrupt standoffishness all the more apparent. Where before they had moved easily around each other, now Adam was forced to watch Lynch from a distance, and note the absence of each casual touch to elbow, shoulder, back or knee as Lynch, ever careless of his power, guided Adam through his small kingdom. He found he missed this contact with a strange, low, unfamiliar intensity which he could not remedy.

Adam had never touched freely or easily. How could he, when he had never learnt how? His childhood had been awash with touch: the brief, hard cuff of the stablemaster, his mother’s pinching hands and his father, ever watchful, ever ready with a heavy hand on his shoulder, the sharp nudge of a boot against cracked ribs. These were the types of touch he understood, and he had learnt well to avoid them. Now that talent bled into his every human interaction, rendered him a tactile mute.

He could identify this new space between his body and Ronan’s, but was helpless to bridge it.

And yet, despite – perhaps even because of – that seemingly inviolable handspan of clear air, something fresh has begun to bloom between them. That night with the monster, fighting side-by side, and the secret it had forcibly revealed, has changed something vital. Before, it had been Lynch and Opal causing mischief, and Adam standing watch to one side, the voice of reason and responsibility: a witness, not an actor. Now, it’s as though his stint brandishing that cane has opened Lynch’s eyes to another possible Adam Parrish, one not even Adam himself had suspected. He finds himself the object of speculative glances, and more than once catches Lynch and Opal studying him over the edge of a book, as one might examine an underdog racehorse for hidden talents.

“Parrish.”

Adam glances up to see Lynch standing, jittery and eager as a hunting dog, in the doorway.

“What can I do for you, Lynch?”

Ronan glowers at him, but Adam just waits him out; he has long since become immune to such looks. Eventually, predictably, Ronan breaks and rolls his eyes.

“What do you know about Hansoms?”

“…Nothing. Why?”

“Because I’ve got one, and one of the wheels is sticking. Will you look at it?”

In his previous life as a stable boy Adam had, of course, helped to maintain the various carriages belonging to the family at Henrietta, and those belonging to any visitors. In his first years at Aglionby, before his quickness made him more valuable as a teaching assistant, Adam had performed similar chores. Still, they’re not skills he’s had to think about in some time. It wasn’t bad work, but he still remembers the flush of pride when the headmaster had called him in and told him he would no longer be spending his afternoons in the stables. In his mind the smell of axal grease and horses is forever linked to that earlier time, the period before he became the Adam he is now. He’s not sure he wants to muddy the waters.

“I think your stablemaster would not appreciate my interference.”

“He’s conducting business in town,” Ronan says impatiently, oblivious to Adam’s conflict, “And you’re cleverer than he is. It’s an engineering problem. I’ll fetch Opal and meet you down there in fifteen minutes, she’ll be interested.”

And so Adam finds himself bending gingerly, mindful of soiling his trouser knees, to peer up into the undercarriage of a battered Hansom cab.

“Where did you even find this?”

Ronan shrugs, “Bought it from a mate in Dublin.”

“ _Why_?”

And, suddenly, Ronan smiles. It is not his shark smile or his bitter smile or the soft, helplessly amused expression he gets when Opal does something that is very _Opal_ and he smiles almost against his will. This smile is wide and wild and brimming over with anticipatory glee, and Adam, meeting Ronan’s eyes across the footwell, feels something in him lift in response. Ronan, he thinks, recognises it, because the smile changes again, ever so slightly, into something even wider, and hungry at the edges.

“Parrish,” he says steadily, not breaking their gaze for a second, “Have you any idea how fast you can get one of these things to go?”

Adam covers his face with his hand but can’t quite smother his grin.

Predictably it’s a disaster, and Mrs Sargent scolds them ruthlessly as she patches knees and dabs at cuts and tries, in vain, to make Opal _sit still so I can look at you, you wicked child_. But the thing is, though he tears a cuff and has to watch his bruises changing colour in the looking glass every day for a week, Adam thinks he’ll never forget the wild _whoop_ of Ronan’s laughter, the raw joy in his eyes, or the way he had glanced over at Adam, just moments before the crash, and Adam had felt seen to his bones.

The Hansom is just one of many such incidents. Adam grows used, on his mornings off, to hearing thunder on the stairs and looking up to find Ronan, or Opal, or both, hanging on the library door, flush-faced and bright eyed, eager to drag him off to some fresh catastrophe-in-progress.

“Adam, what do you know about slingshots?”

“Parrish, you ever set off a firework?”

“Adam, we’re going to build a treehouse.”

“Adam! Ronan’s set the small barn on fire!”

“Parrish, look at this snake, would you –”

“I’ve found a bird’s nest!”

“I think something’s gone wrong with that experiment –”

“How fast can a sika run?”

“Adam –”

“Parrish –”

“Adam –”

And Adam, who has always prided himself on his careful planning skills, his propensity for thought before action, his calculated approach to life in general, finds himself changing, growing, shifting before his very eyes. Something _was_ lost that night between Ronan and he, but Adam begins to think it may spring back even stronger than before, and this time he will be there to meet it. He goes though all the right motions, lays out his books and pens and papers and bends, attentively, to his work; but his ear is always cocked, listening for that first foot- or hoof-fall on the stairs, waiting, waiting, to be swept up and into some new trouble.

His work slows. His wardrobe suffers.

He doesn’t care.

As spring arrives again, sending delicate green feelers out into the warming air, Adam Parrish realises, in a moment as vivid as Revelation, that for the first time in his life he is _happy_.

“ _Bugger_ ,” Ronan says succinctly, glaring at what used to be a flowerpot.

Opal and Adam exchange a serious look.

“Try again?” Adam offers.

Blue eyes and black dart to him, twinned in their brilliance and intensity, their single-minded focus on him, Adam Parrish. Ward and warden both are steady in their faith that he will work this out, solve the mystery, that together they will overcome this hiccough and go forth unto mayhem and wonder. That certainty flutters wildly in Adam’s chest and he gets to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish there were time to detail the _endless_ trouble I am sure these three get into. I sort of imagine a farm-themed, 19th century combination of _Mythbusters_ , _Top Gear_ and _Bill Nye the Science Guy_ all rolled into one, probably with more mud and leaves.
> 
> As always, your comments and kudos keep me going :) Thank you, and please let me know if you've any questions, remarks, etc. I love hearing from you all.
> 
> ~  
> Next chapter: A journey planned, a breaking point, a series of tense decisions and revelations.


	9. If I can't do better, how is it to be helped?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An unwelcome missive, tensions rise.
> 
> _As Ronan shoves his chair back and storms out of the breakfast room, Adam watches him leave and thinks he has never been more cognisant of the gulf between their stations._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have to apologise because this is only part of the chapter I intended to post today. I've never been quite happy with the next bit, and I messed around with it a little more as I read it over, then I decided that I didn't want to post it until I'd slept on it and done a final re-read for sense.
> 
> Therefore: apologies for how short this is. Rest assured, the next part is brimming over with tension, angst, secrets brought finally to light, and perhas even a little cathartic resolution ;) I just want to be as happy with it as I can be before releasing it into the wild.
> 
> So this is just to tide you over: the bulk of this chapter (and it is long) I will post tomorrow.
> 
> Sorry again - happy reading.

Of course, equilibrium had a way of inviting change.

The letter said this:

_Dear Mr Parrish,_

_I hope this finds you well. We have heard good things of you since your departure from Henrietta almost a decade ago._

_I am writing now on behalf of your mother. She is quite ill, and though the Family would never turn out a servant from so longstanding a line, I am afraid she is no longer able to perform her duties at The House. She will have to be moved to one of the old cottages on The Estate, and she has asked me to write to you in the hope that you, now you are so comfortably settled, will come to see her into her new home._

_You were such a good boy. I have no doubt that you will do your duty by your mother._

_Kind regards,_

_Mr Smythe_

_Henrietta_

_Kent_

For the first time in months, Adam dug the little black velvet pouch out of the back of his dresser and spread his cards across the bedsheets.

 _Bad news_. _A choice_. _A maternal figure_.

Adam snorted. _Maternal figure_. No help there.

 _A journey. Expect delays_. And then: _the possibility of closure_.

Adam loosed a long breath and went to find Ronan Lynch.

“I need an advance,” he said without preamble. He couldn’t couch it prettily, he’d lose his nerve.

“Of course,” Lynch said absently. Adam saw the moment when he backtracked to re-examine the conversation. He leant back from his desk and crossed his arms over his chest, tilting his head to one side, “What do you mean, _you need an advance_? Got a gambling problem I don’t know about, Parrish?”

“No,” Adam said levelly, “I need it for travel expenses.” Lynch went quite still, “I will also need leave from my teaching duties. I will prepare a syllabus for Opal to complete in my absence. She won’t fall behind.”

“How long?” Lynch demanded.

“I can’t be certain. Not more than a month, I hope.”

“A _month_?”

Adam eyed him steadily. Ronan glared back, eyes as cool and clear as diamond chips.

“And where will you be travelling to?”

Adam had known it would be like this. That Ronan would press him for details, no matter how obviously he did not wish to give them. Leaving things unsaid was not the Lynch way.

“I’m going home.”

It felt like the wrong word as soon as Adam said it, no matter that it was technically correct. Lynch’s eyes narrowed.

“What do you mean, _home_? Back to the _school_? Aren’t you an _orphan_?”

Because he was used to Ronan’s casual bastardry, Adam ignored this.

“No,” he told him, “I’m not. I’m going back to the house where I was born.”

Lynch waited with obvious impatience, and scowled more deeply as it became clear that Adam did not intend to expand.

“Why are you going back there?” he demanded.

“It’s personal,” Adam said tightly.

“Personal.”

“Yes, Lynch, personal. Not everything in my life revolves around The Barns, or Opal, or you. Will you give me the time, and the advance, or not?” He shocked himself with his vehemence, but once said he could hardly take the words back.

Ronan’s eyes hardened. “Of course I’ll give you what you want,” he said. He sounded cold, but something about the words felt weighted, “No need to get snippy.”

“Thank you,” Adam grit out.

“You are welcome, Mr Parrish. Would you like a bank note, or shall I give you the money direct?”

“The money, if you have it.”

“And when will you be leaving us?”

Adam swallowed. The way he said it made it sound as if Lynch neither expected nor particularly wished for his return.

“I will go within the week.”

“Fine. I’ll have Mr Black draw your advance from the safe. He’ll bring it to you.”

Lynch glared firmly at his papers until it became clear that he would say nothing else, and Adam excused himself to go back to the library, feeling jittery and not knowing why.

Over the next few days they either avoid each other or, when Opal forces them together, engage in the sort of whispered shouting matches that leave them both flushed and furious and no further than they had been.

Lynch is infuriated by the merest hint of an untruth. Adam vehemently resents the suggestion that he is beholden to share all his secrets at the whim of his employer. As Ronan shoves his chair back and storms out of the breakfast room, Adam watches him leave and thinks he has never been more cognisant of the gulf between their stations. Ronan Lynch, who has had everything his whole life, whose only shames are things he chased down of his own volition, has no way to understand what it is to be Adam Parrish. To have begun in the dirt of Henrietta’s stables, ground down beneath his father’s heel. To have clawed his way by wit and brute stubbornness alone to this: lush gardens and regular mealtimes and work he actually enjoys, and the respect of people he cares for.

Ronan insists that everything is black and white, that omission is kin to dishonesty, and all dishonesty grounds for absolute mistrust. But Adam needs his secrets. He needs to hold Ronan at arm’s length on this one thing, because though they are so very different he thinks, he hopes, that they are also in a very true way friends. He can’t bear to have Ronan look at him and see the Adam he is now overcast with the dust of his beginnings, but Ronan won’t give it up, and so their tension remains insoluble.

Mrs Sargent watches their dispute from afar and shakes her head, but can’t offer any better advice than to tell Adam he must do what he thinks is best. This is so close to useless that Adam almost snaps at her, too, that he’s _trying_ to do just that, and feels guilty about it for the rest of the day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up tomorrow: late-night arguments. Regrets, dreams and secrets confessed.
> 
> See you then - thanks for your patience.


	10. When you are near me, as now.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Midnight conversations, dreams and longings, and doing battle with monsters of the incorporeal variety.
> 
> _“_ Personal _,” Ronan sneers, “Like having a sodding nightmare and almost being murdered in my bed? That kind of personal?”_
> 
> _“Ronan…”_
> 
> _“You’ve never told me one shitting thing about your past, do you know that? Everything I know about you came from bloody letters of introduction.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised - part 2.   
> Sorry for the delay and thank you for your patience :)

It’s very late, and Adam can’t sleep. He’s to leave the day after tomorrow, and already his nerves are wound tighter than a watch spring. He can feel himself retreating, rebuilding walls he hasn’t needed in years, and Opal’s confusion, Mrs Sargent’s concern, Ronan’s impotent, simmering anger are all starting to weigh on him. He can’t explain to them that his withdrawal is impersonal: he’s preparing for a quiet war, and must gather his defences in advance.

He has shoved his pillow around, pulled blankets on and off his mattress, recited Ovid at the canopy over his bed. Eventually he gets up, wrapping himself in the absurdly beautiful midnight blue dressing gown, with its thick winter padding and collar of embroidered silk, which Ronan had ordered from Paris to replace his ruined one (and refused, under pain of any torture, to take back), and pads out into the hall. Some faint instinct guides him down the servant’s staircase and into the airy back parlour which opens on the western terrace. It doesn’t take him long to figure out why.

The glass doors sit ajar. On the terrace outside, picked out by stars, stands Ronan Lynch. He’s still in his day clothes, great black coat thrown around his shoulders like armour, flapping as he paces back and forth. Adam isn’t surprised. Ronan’s general aversion to sleep has made more sense to him since he learnt about the dreams or, more specifically, the nightmares.

“Can’t sleep?” he asks, pushing through the door. The air is cold, and he turns up his collar to protect his neck. Ronan makes an impatient gesture, as though damning him for asking the obvious.

“Does the pacing help?” Adam enquires, “I’ve always wondered.”

Ronan grunts at him, non-committal.

“What are you doing here, Parrish? You don’t want to talk to me.”

“That’s not true.” The truth is that he wishes to talk to Ronan far more often than he allows himself to seek him out. “I simply don’t wish to discuss my travel arrangements.”

Ronan bites back a word; Adam can still tell it’s knife-edged and most likely lewd.

“I’m no good at fucking pretending,” Ronan snarls.

“I’m aware.”

“Well, then, don’t come out here and ask me to fucking pretend, you prick!”

“Why does it matter to you so much?”

“Because you’re hiding it,” Ronan answers immediately.

Adam should have just made something up. He knows that. But somehow the idea of lying to Ronan outright had been unendurable.

“Why are you going?” Ronan asks again. Every time, he says it with a sense of absolute conviction: _this_ time he will get an answer. Every time, Adam’s roiling mix of guilt and frustration flares anew to meet him.

“It’s personal.”

“ _Personal_ ,” Ronan sneers, “Like having a sodding nightmare and almost being murdered in my bed? That kind of personal?”

“Ronan…”

“You’ve never told me one shitting thing about your past, do you know that? Everything I know about you came from bloody letters of introduction.”

“That’s not true.” Adam feels oddly stung. Before this week he really hadn’t thought it mattered, but Ronan says this as though he’s been thinking about it a long time, and this is hurtful, somehow, to Adam. He has always clung so tightly to the belief that his past is less important than what he is now. Ronan is supposed to value truth, and Adam’s present is the truest thing that’s ever happened to him. “We speak every day. You know all sorts of things about me.” Ronan knows more about him than any other human being on earth. Sometimes, this is very literally terrifying.

“I know nothing about your life before you came to live in my fucking house!”

“And you don’t need to!”

“ _What are you trying to hide_?”

“I don’t owe you this, Lynch!” Adam explodes, “I’m allowed my past, I’m allowed secrets. You don’t fucking _own me_!”

Ronan stares at him, blindsided. Adam can see at once that he is truly hurt.

“I don’t want to _own_ you, Adam. I want to _know_ you.”

“Well,” Adam tells him, tired all at once, “You can’t.”

Lynch whirls on him, pale eyes hot and furious.

“What use am I to you, Parrish, if you will not let me in? How can I help you if you insist on keeping me at arm’s length? I’ve shared with you my deepest, most closely guarded secret and you remain, as ever, a fucking enigma. Why did you follow me out here? What are you even about, skulking around at night when decent folks are abed?”

“ _You’re_ awake,” Adam points out.

Ronan laughs, a brittle bark. “I am not, by any bloody definition of the word, ‘decent’.”

Adam folds his arms and keeps his gaze steady, “So you say, but I’ve seen no evidence of it.”

Laughing again – a wild, harshly-edged sound – Ronan drags his hands over his shaven scalp and twists them viciously together behind his neck. He tilts his head back, looking at the overcast sky and says softly, “It is lucky, Adam Parrish, that you cannot read my mind as clearly as you read those cards of yours. If you knew what I –” he shakes his head and sinks abruptly to sit on the edge of the terrace, bowing forward to rest his elbows on his knees, “No. I really don’t imagine you’d think me decent at all, if you knew what I dream of.”

Adam picks his way forwards and sits carefully beside him on the ledge. That perpetual handspan of empty space feels very wide between them, tonight. “You cannot be expected to control your nightmares,” he offers reasonably.

“I am not talking about _nightmares_.”

“Well,” Adam says carefully, “You can’t control your dreams, either.”

“ _I_ can,” Ronan snaps.

Adam shoots him a sidelong look, “That plant you made? The terrible one that caterwauls when you stroke its leaves? You did that on purpose?[1]”

Ronan huffs something that is, at least, laugh adjacent. “That song is fucking beautiful.”

“No.” Adam tells him firmly. He feels himself relax, infinitesimally. This is familiar ground.

But Ronan has always been prone to swerve just when the road looked straight and clear.

“I dream about you.”

Adam blinks at him, caught off-guard completely, “Me?”

And Ronan gets this look about him, then, that Adam has only seen rarely and from a safe distance. It’s the look he has when his brother calls unannounced, that he had when a horse he’d loved had broken a leg and had to be put down, when a (recently unemployed) lawyer suggested they could hold an auction to ‘clear out the detritus in the western wing’. That look says it’s not just that Ronan Lynch _wants_ to break something, it’s that he’s already decided to. His next steps will be the careful, calculated rending of parts, or a deliberate hurricane designed to inflict all possible damage. Perhaps Adam should move out of the way. Instead, he finds that all he can do is sit very, very still.

“Yes, Parrish, you. God, do I dream of you.”

Adam feels like he is sinking into something, or perhaps coming unstuck. He’s not yet sure what this is but he can feel it in his veins, a glittering premonition of change, before Ronan speaks.

“Do you know what your hands would look like on my skin?”

Ronan’s voice is rough-edged and raw. His hands wring together in vicious, painful shapes in his lap, and Adam feels like he had when that horse had stumbled: nothing but a spectator, helpless in the face of a certain fall. The dam is breached; Ronan speaks as though he’s helpless to stop. The unsteady tangle of fear and longing in his voice is nearly unbearable to Adam, and he almost reaches out, covers Ronan’s fingers with his own. He knows that isn’t what Ronan means.

“Do you know how your bruises would look on my hips?” Ronan asks, softly rhetorical, “Or the sounds I would make with your teeth at my neck? Or when I kissed you, or touched your throat? I do,” Ronan says, “I know because I’ve dreamed about it, every permutation my base history can provide, and fresh visions, too. I have gotten so close – so close to feeling what it would be, to have you over me. And I hate it, Adam,” a moment of vehemence, “I hate that I’ve imagined it all, because I don’t _know_ , for _sure_. I fucking hate _everything_ I don’t know about you, Parrish. Every person you’ve loved, every place you’ve lived, every book you’ve read…I want to know all of it. I’m fucking ravenous. And now you’re leaving, for God knows how long, or why, and I…I can’t stand for you to go. I can’t stand that you will leave me, a mystery still. _I don’t want you to go_. I want, I…” he swallows the last words, and their absence hangs in the air between them like a physical thing.

In all this time, he has not looked at Adam. Instead, Lynch’s eyes are fixed straight ahead, cutting across the wide sweep of lawn to sink deep into the forest’s shadows. He seems smaller than usual, somehow, compressed by the weight of his confession. That space between them feels cavernous and cruelly deep, and the night is taut as an un-plucked string. Adam holds his breath.

And yet. The things Ronan describes are not monstrous to him – though the way Ronan says them that makes Adam think _Ronan_ believes they must be so, to Adam, and this belief torments them both. What _Adam_ believes – Adam can’t yet articulate his thoughts on Ronan’s disquisition. He needs time to process the words, the images they conjure, the rough flutter of butterfly wings and heat now waking in his gut. Feeling unsteady, Adam tries to rise. He is overwhelmed, body, mind and spirit. Ronan’s hand shoots out to stop him, catching his sleeve. It’s the first time Ronan has deliberately touched him in weeks, and the shock of it stills Adam instantly.

“No, please,” Ronan whispers, letting his hand drop, “Don’t get up.” He sounds thinned-out, exhausted. He pushes himself jaggedly to his feet and stumbles off across the lawn. Adam moves naturally against this instruction and lopes after him; hearing his step Ronan turns, and, toppling every barrier he’d so recently erected between them, pushes into Adam’s space. He is so close that Adam can’t make out his eyes. The impending storm has blacked out the stars, burying them in shadows, and Ronan looms over him like a great black bird.

Adam holds his ground. “Are you trying to frighten me away?” he asks quietly into the still, storm-charged air between them, “Why?”

“Because you are leaving. Because there is something in your past that is taking you away from me and _you won’t even tell me what it is_.”

“There isn’t!” Adam snaps, temper flaring sudden and hot, “There _isn’t_. Good god, Lynch, how can an intelligent man arrive with such bloody-minded certitude at so wrong a conclusion? Have I ever given you the slightest hint I was unhappy here? That I was not content with my position? I tell you again, there is nothing to keep me away. I will come back.” _To The Barnes, to Opal. To you_ , he doesn’t say, _I will come home_.

“You _hadn’t_ given any such impression,” Ronan snarls, “Until I heard there was a letter for you from England, and next I knew you were knocking on my door asking for money! Adam,” Ronan bends towards him like a reed, hands rising to hover uncertainly about Adam’s face as he searches his eyes. Lynch has such sharp instincts. Adam forgets that sometimes. Ronan doesn’t, can’t possibly know the true shape and character of the danger Adam is preparing himself to walk willingly towards, but he senses that it is there, that there is something waiting in England that could yet do Adam harm. He is wrong about the nature of the risk, but he feels its weight regardless. “If you are in trouble, of any kind. If you need something from me. You must know – you _must_ know – that I’d deny you nothing. _Please_ tell me what it is, and let me help you. I’ll take you as far as London myself. Whatever you need, if it is in my power, I’ll give it.”

“Lynch – ” Adam begins, and stops, overwhelmed by the magnitude – the deliberately un-bordered scope – of Ronan’s offer. He feels as though his chest has become too tight for his lungs when he says, “ _Ronan_. I really don’t need anything from you –” Ronan’s face folds into a scowl and he turns away, “ _No_ ,” Adam says, reaching blindly for his wrist, “I mean I _have everything I need_. Ronan,” he curls his fingers gently around the bone, tugs Ronan firmly back around, “I have it. You gave it before I even asked you.”

Ronan won’t look at him. His mouth is curled into a sneer and he holds himself rigid within Adam’s grasp, arm stuck out away from his body, putting as much distance between them as can be had without breaking Adam’s hold.

“Why are you going back to a home you despise?” Ronan demands. That perceptiveness again, honed to a sharp and devastating point. Of course he knows this about Adam without being told. Of course part of his rage is born of confusion, an awareness that Adam is forcing himself, for some unimaginable reason, to return to a place he loathes.

“I have personal business to attend to,” Adam says, and then quickly, before Ronan can jump in, “I have an account to settle. Loose ends to tie up. I’m not _going home_ , Ronan, I’m just…finishing something I started a long time ago.” Gently, he shakes Ronan’s wrist, tugs at it again, willing him to turn and face him, willing him to move back in close. He feels the space between them more keenly than ever, but he is trying to bridge it, hoping against hope that, illiterate as he is in affection of all kinds, he can find a way. To think of leaving things as they are, a sea between them and so much unresolved, is suddenly unendurable. “I couldn’t be going home even if I wanted to, because _this_ is home. The Barnes is my home. I’m not _leaving_ , Ronan. It’s a return journey.”

Slowly, as if unwilling, Ronan turns back towards him, but he keeps his head bent low, staring at their feet.

“Are you sure?” he says, finally, so soft that Adam has to strain to hear it. Ronan asks as though he can hardly bear to be answered. “You might feel differently once you get there.”

“I won’t,” Adam says with absolute certainty, “And in any case, why should I?”

Ronan shrugs. “I’m strange, Opal’s stranger,” Adam might dispute that ranking, some other time, “Our whole bloody life here is one weird shitstorm after another. Aren’t you afraid you’ll wake some morning and find I’ve dreamed up a swarm of lethal bees, or an avalanche, or an army of monsters?”

“Well,” Adam admits, though it is pains him a little, “Sometimes.”

“What if, once you arrive, you find you enjoy the certainty of knowing you won’t be woken by embodied nightmares, or have to spend your day chasing me and Opal around and keeping us from blowing ourselves sky high? That sounds quite…peaceful, probably.”

“I don’t want peaceful, Ronan.”

“Don’t you?”

He squeezes Ronan’s wrist and tries to imbue a single word with all the conviction he holds within himself. To convey all the mornings he has woken from dreaming about his childhood to see the faded canopy over his bed, and thought _Oh,_ yes _, I’m here again. Thank god_.

“No.” Adam says.

Ronan’s eyes flutter shut. He’s silent for a long moment; Adam thinks he’s steeling himself for something more, though he cannot imagine a risk greater than those Lynch has already taken tonight.

“Why aren’t you ever frightened of me?”

Adam shrugs. This one is easy. “I don’t think you’re very frightening.”

Ronan makes a sharp noise in his throat, “You know what I can do. That should frighten any sane man.”

“I won’t stand out here in the cold with you making jokes about my sanity, Lynch,” Adam tells him, “I’m not afraid of you because I know you would never deliberately do anything to harm me, or anyone you care for.”

“But I could still hurt you,” Ronan points out, “And badly. I could have a nightmare and bring the whole house down. I’m dangerous to know.”

“Every human being has the capacity to hurt others,” Adam says calmly, because with the distance of years Adam has discovered a sense of objectivity in this regard, “And many use it.”

Bluntly, with his hand, Adam describes the line of Ronan’s broad shoulders, traces the shape of one leanly muscled arm with a fingertip, “Do you really think,” he asks quietly, “If I were still myself, and you were just an ordinary man – if you lost your temper, if I angered you – that you could not inflict real damage upon my person?”

Ronan flinches sharply, staring up at him and then quickly back at his boots, “I _never_ would.”

“ _I_ know that,” Adam says steadily, “I’m telling _you_ that.”

“You were right, though,” Ronan whispers to the ground, “I can’t always control it. Everyone around me is at risk. I put those I care for in the way of harm.”

Perhaps it’s the strangeness of the night; or Ronan’s earlier, filthy confessions, still burning in the back of Adam’s mind, waiting to be unpacked at a later time; or perhaps it’s the freedom of having done it twice already, bridged the gap, laid his own hand on Ronan Lynch and not been brushed away. Adam finds it easy now to lift his palm and press it, skin to skin, against the back of Ronan’s neck. His fingers curl intimately of their own accord, brushing the black hooks of his tattoo.

“I knew that a month ago, Lynch,” he tells him, “Nothing’s changed.”

Ronan nods absently, gaze still fixed on the grass at his feet. _He does not believe me_ , Adam thinks clearly, _He is certain that, in his absence, I will change my mind_ , and Adam suddenly feels he must do… _something_. Something significant. Something to break Ronan from this bleak depression and elicit a response that is visceral and true.

What he says is, “I wish I’d stayed that night.”

Ronan glances up at him warily from beneath his lashes, “Which ‘that’ night?”

“The first nightmare,” and then, feeling reckless, heart making a sharp jump in his chest, adds, “The night you kissed my arm.”

Ronan seems to curl in on himself, hanging his head even lower between his hunched shoulders. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he mutters, barely loud enough for Adam to hear.

“Kissed me?”

Ronan scrubs a hand across his scalp. He still won’t look at Adam, yet he’s made no move to put distance between them or to shake off Adam’s grasp, “Yes. No. Perhaps. Shouted at you. I was so fucking afraid of…all of it. Just. All of it. That was a goddamned awful night.”

“I still think I hear it sometimes. The sound it made.” Adam shudders involuntarily and then, when Ronan only presses his lips together and says nothing, realises belatedly that of course for him it isn’t over. It never will be. Every time he sleeps he faces the possibility of new horrors or the return of old ones, and he faces them unaided.

“I shouldn’t have left you alone with that thing,” he says fiercely, “I didn’t want to. I couldn’t stand the thought of you going to sleep with it simply…lying there. I went back to my bed half convinced it had all been a terrible dream, and half that we hadn’t really killed it and I’d wake to find you dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Ronan offers. He sounds small. Adam squeezes gently at the back of his neck. When he brushes his thumb up to the hinge of Ronan’s jaw, carefully, cautiously, he feels the skin quiver beneath his palm.

“Ronan,” he says, very quietly.

“Yes?”

Adam takes his heart in his mouth. “Do you really dream of me?”

Again, he feels Ronan tremble beneath his hand, skin pricking up to gooseflesh. He whispers, “Yes.”

Adam swallows thickly. “What do you dream?”

“Everything,” Ronan answers immediately. Perhaps it’s been on the tip of his tongue all this time, just waiting to tumble out, “Touching you, kissing you, holding you, talking to you, taking you to Rome, to Prague, to your precious bloody Ashmolean Museum. Waking up with you, going to sleep with you, chasing Opal around like a fucking lunatic with you. I dream it all,” and then, softer, a confessional murmur, “I want it all.”

Adam says nothing, just brushes his thumb again in its slow path up and down the side of Ronan’s neck. Ronan sighs surrender and finally presses into the touch. Adam thinks his eyes are closed.

“Fuck, Adam,” he says, “Do you truly want the gory details? Honestly, I know I’ve not been fair. I’ve hounded you for your every thought, and yet I’m hardly forthcoming with my own. But, Adam, I would tell you anything, if you asked me to. Every goddamn awful, vile or beautiful thing I’ve ever done or imagined. I’d make you a gift of my every secret. I think if I told you, you’d –” he swallows roughly, “I believe you’d think ill of me, for many of them, but you’ve only to say the word. I’ll do it if you ask.”

Adam stands very still, watching Ronan’s shoulders heave. His breath clouds between them, and Ronan’s voice has gone very soft.

“Stop fucking looking at me like that, Parrish,” he says quietly, ragged at the edges. Adam feels like they’re both teetering on the edge of a cliff: longing to jump, terrified you’ll fall, “You really don’t know what I am.”

And Adam, amazed that he’d ever believed this was hard, slides his hand around to cradle Ronan’s rough jaw, nudging it up.

“How do you know how I’m looking at you, Lynch?”

Adam still can’t make out Ronan’s eyes clearly in the shadows, but he can feel their weight upon him, heavy and barely contained.

“Like that,” Ronan says thickly, “ _Just_ like that.”

Ronan reaches out again, like before, his hands almost touching Adam’s face. Adam can feel the heat of them, the flush rising in his cheeks to match it.

“So?” Adam asks. He sweeps his thumb over the soft skin beneath Ronan’s eye. God, it’s so easy, now, he’ll never be able to stop; the realisation makes him shiver.

Ronan seems to see it, to sense something in it, because, delicately as he might lift a hatchling from its nest, he touches his fingers to Adam’s neck. His thumbs fit smoothly to the hinge of his jaw, as though designed for it, and Adam draws a shaky breath and looks up into the shadows of his eyes.

“You’ll tell me if you want me to stop,” Ronan says.

And Adam huffs, a laugh equal parts relief and disbelief, “Obviously,” he says, and then kisses him. Easy. “I know who you are, Ronan Lynch,” Adam says against his lips, which are soft and dry, and open for him like a safe port in a storm. He feels Ronan’s breath stutter against his chest, the length of his body swaying into Adam’s like a sapling bending helplessly in the breeze, “And the rest I will discover. I am not afraid.”

In Ronan’s room, in Ronan’s bed, Adam strokes a long line up Ronan’s bare arm, revelling in the feel of warm skin beneath his fingertips, the way Ronan shivers at his touch. He’s never seen so much bare skin before, nor touched it so languidly, or been able to delight so freely in it.

“Why didn’t you say anything until now? Nothing, and then an avalanche. I thought you meant to bury us.”

Ronan glares up at him balefully. “I did say something – I _did_ something – and you flinched like I’d struck you. I thought…”

Adam starts to shake his head, and then thinks back to the night he learnt how Ronan’s nightmares sometimes followed him home. Again, he feels phantom breath against his wrist, lips against his skin.

“I was surprised,” he admits, “I’d never – I don’t have much experience,” Adam can feel the flush warming his skin.

“I didn’t think kissing required a bloody explanation.”

“I didn’t know what to think. You were injured, and we were both exhausted, and the monster was – and _then_ – you shouted at me, and I assumed it was…I don’t know. Something else. Nothing. A physiological reaction in the aftermath of battle. I tried _not_ to think about it, honestly.”

This is evidently the wrong thing to say. Ronan jerks himself upright and away from Adam’s hand, gathering his limbs into himself protectively.

“I see.”

“Not all of us have the luxury of listening to our feelings,” Adam snaps. He’s surprised by how suddenly the anger comes. The shift between them from perfect understanding to insurmountable difference dazes him sometimes. “Do you think I can afford to mope around, mooning after you like the damsel in a romance novel? I have responsibilities, a livelihood to make, a career to think of. I cannot afford some silly dalliance – with a man, with my employer, no less! – have you even thought of that? Do you know what would become of me if somebody found out?” _Or if you tired of me, or we fought and you turned me out, or publicly disgraced me, or married, or, or –_

Ronan’s face has gone cold as marble. In the low lamplight his eyes are shadowed, and his expression is utterly unreadable.

“Careless of you, Parrish, to know the risks and yet engage in such a fancy. But you needn’t worry. We haven’t done much to offend your delicate sensibilities. You can return to your bed at any time, and when you decide to seek a new position I will still furnish you with any recommendations or introductions you require. I am a despicable bastard, to be sure, but an honourable one.”

“I already told you I’m not going anywhere,” Adam snaps, “Not for long. Though I might choose to extend my journey if this self-pitying routine continues.”

“Self-pitying!” Ronan snarls. He leans forward furiously into Adam’s space. He is bare to the waist, but he looks magnificent even – perhaps especially – in his nakedness, lean and strong, as dangerous as a young god. Black ink curves low against his neck, angling for a collarbone. “I would not even know where to start. You listen to my _intimate_ fucking confession, reassure me of your interest, _take me to bed_ , and once you are satisfied of _my_ affections condescend to inform me that these feelings are impractical, and our ‘dalliance’ an impediment to your career. I hope I have adequately sated your curiosity with tonight’s activities, for I assure you there will be no repeat performance.”

Adam can see their future now, unfolding before him. Their sharp edges sparking against each other indefinitely, catching fire at the least incentive. They are both prideful, angry, volatile creatures, prone to bite first and then try clumsily to apologise. If this is all they have to look forward to, it will be very, very tiring.

Carefully, he extends a hand and, just as he had some few hours before, places his palm against Ronan’s stubbled cheek.

“Ronan,” he says quietly.

Ronan glares at him ferociously, but again there’s that animal undercurrent to his stillness, watchful and intent. Wariness lurks behind his eyes. Adam slides his hand around to gently grip the back of Ronan’s neck and hold him still when he touches their foreheads together.

“I’m not like you,” he whispers into the space between them, “I’m cautious. I move slowly. Before I came here and met Opal, and Mrs Sargent, and you – god, Ronan, when I met you – I had never been… _happy_ before. I didn’t even _know_ I had never been happy. I had never been warm, or cared for. I had never been more affectionate with anybody than a teacher might be with a particularly promising pupil. I had colleagues amongst the staff at Aglionby, but I did not have friends. ” For someone who had claimed to want his past, _past_ , he is certainly giving away a lot of it tonight. He breathes in slowly, feels Ronan mirror him in the intimate space between their mouths. “I did not even know, until I came here and was made to feel them, that the emotions I had read about in books were literal and real. I’m sorry that I am clumsy with words. I’m sorry I upset you. If you truly want me, you may need to accept that I will probably upset you on many, many occasions to come.

“But I do want you, Ronan. And you must believe me because I don’t know how to lie about this. I only just learnt the truth of it myself.”

There is silence for a long minute. Adam is holding his breath. The weight of it in his chest, of all the things he’s just said, and all the things _Ronan_ might do or say in reply, is excruciating. He has never said anything like this before. He feels raw with it, flayed open.

Ronan groans something like a curse and Adam’s back hits the bed before he even understands he is in motion.

“You’re a fucking prick, do you know that?” Ronan demands. Adam nods resignedly. He does know. “You’re not leaving?”

Adam shakes his head, then nods again, “I am. But I’m coming back. I told you already. I swear it.”

“And this,” Ronan gestures between them, “It’s not…I don’t know how to do anything by halves,” Ronan says, as though this might be a secret Adam does not know. Adam snorts, ungentlemanly, and Ronan pokes him hard in the side, “I’m serious, you arsefucking bastard. This isn’t – God,” his face twists in disgust, “I’m not taking advantage of you, or exercising my ‘rights’ as master, or whatever sick fucking thing men do. I want you as my equal,” Adam stares at him, “I’m serious, fucker. We’ll find Opal another tutor, whatever you think is best. I –”

“No,” Adam says, “No, Ronan, I don’t think…I never meant that I thought that, about you. I was just trying to explain that I…I never let myself imagine this. I couldn’t. I couldn’t let myself want you, not really, without knowing you wanted me, too. It wasn’t worth thinking about. I couldn’t bear it.”

“Oh,” Ronan says, small.

Adam smooths his hands up Ronan’s thighs where they bracket his hips, brings his palms to rest at Ronan’s bare waist, digging in his fingers.

“I want you,” Adam says, feeling like he should be awarded a medal for this. He’s never been so brave in all his life, “You, your dreams, Opal. All of it.”

“The big fucking house probably doesn’t hurt.” Ronan smirks at him.

Rage and shame burn though Adam like a flash fire. He jerks back as far as he can, lying flat on his back and pinned beneath Ronan’s body, which is not very far, and Ronan –

Laughs at him. The complete and utter wanker.

“Relax, Parrish.” Adam makes a furious noise in his throat and shoves at him, and Ronan pins his hands gently beside his head, dipping in to run his nose along the side of Adam’s jaw, pushing kisses along the skin of his throat, “Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m an arsehole. Tell me you want me again,” he presses a kiss beneath Adam’s ear, on his cheekbone, at the corner of his mouth, “I liked that.” His mouth moves lower again, down the side of Adam’s neck, over his chest, his ribs, as Ronan shuffles backwards to make room, “Tell me,” he insists again, “It’ll be worthwhile.”

“I want you,” Adam breathes, scratching his fingers over Ronan’s scalp, touching the pulse point racing at his jaw. He does not know what’s coming – not in the future and not now, here, in this bed, in this room – but this much is simple and true, “I want you.”

Later – apropos of nothing, and not because he feels beholden but because he…wants to – Adam says, “My mother is ill. I haven’t seen her in nearly ten years.”

Ronan curls his whole, long body around him and lets it alone.

[1] _Murderable squash plant_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know how they say you have to kill your darlings? This chapter needed a lot of that. It was _so dramatic_ in its first itteration (by which I mean: Ronan was _so dramatic_ ). I've re-written it more than any other part of the fic.
> 
> I'm still not really sure I've gotten Ronan's confession right - at the start it was furious and a lot more explicit, and I toned it down and down and down (not that I object to explicit descriptions of sex acts Ronan Lynch wants to perform with Adam Parrish, but it was a bit much all at once)...and now I've read it too many times to be anything like objective. I seriously considered holding off on posting the fic for like another month just to give myself a bit more objectivity re: this one section.
> 
> Oh well. You guys'll tell me if it's rubbish, right? I may yet go back and give it another go over.
> 
> But I hope it's mostly alright, now, and that you enjoy it over-all.
> 
> ~  
> Next chapter: uninvited guests, ongoing negotiations, and (let's all be honest about this) the smut I know some of you, at least, have been waiting for.


	11. Into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inconvenient guests, risky decisions, complex navigations.
> 
> _“Come down,” he says, softly, “Opal’s asking for you.” I’m asking for you. I haven’t seen you all day and want you close._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for smut. If you like that sort of thing, read on; if you don't, read until "I like a lot of things" and then skip to the next chapter (the last few lines of this one are safe, too, but not essential).
> 
> A warning also for...not precisely period-typical homophobia, but rather anticipated difficulties arising from it. More in the endnotes for this chapter.
> 
> Apologies for not uploading this yesterday - rl is not always kind to a fic schedule.
> 
> More apologies because I have not yet replied to recent comments, for the same reason. I have, however, read and loved them all.

It’s just gone eleven when the carriages arrive. Adam and Opal are in the informal music room, which is on the second story of the old house, at the front. When she hears the commotion Opal springs up from the piano bench and clatters to the window, pressing her nose against the glass. Adam follows more sedately, roughing a hand through her dark curls as he peers down on the scene below. Gentlemen in dark coats and hats are milling about, handing ladies down from carriages, helping them to dodge last night’s puddles. He sees Declan’s tall silhouette, holding court and directing the rabble of footmen and house boys, and thinks, _Here comes trouble_.

Sure enough, the party still has not found their way inside when Ronan appears like a wrathful god, tight shouldered and evidently fuming. Opal stifles a giggle and Adam tries to give her a quelling look. He only half succeeds.

“What are they here for?” she whispers, as though the company below might hear them.

“I don’t know. I suppose we’ll find out. I hope Mr Declan Lynch warned Mrs Sargent, at the very least. That’s quite a lot of people.”

Opal mashes her nose more firmly against the window, blowing through her mouth to frost the glass and then, horrifyingly, licking it. Adam closes his eyes and prays for…something. Patience, maybe. The ability to keep a straight face.

“Look at all their fluffy dresses. Do you think they can run in those?”

“I doubt it,” Adam tells her honestly, “But not everybody likes to run the way you do.”

Opal looks dubious. She neither understands nor trusts the kinds of people who spend all their days indoors.

“Do you think we’ll have special dinners while they’re here?”

“Yes, you bottomless pit of a girl, I expect we shall.”

“Do you think Ronan will shout at Mr Lynch?”

“Yes,” Adam tells her wryly, feeling the tug of a smile, “I expect he will.”

“Sometimes it’s funny to watch them,” Opal confesses in a whisper.

“God,” Adam laughs, unable to supress it anymore, “You terrible child. You’re so like your father.”

Below them, the last guest mounts the steps. As he turns to go back into the house, Ronan lifts his head and sees them at the window. He pulls a terrible face, like something out of an overblown tragedy, and Opal giggles wildly and pokes out her tongue. Adam shakes his head at both of them, feeling light, and free, and overfull with feeling.

Ronan pushes open the library door and finds just what he expected: Adam is there, curled deep into that green velvet wingback he favours so much, a heavy book open across his folded knees. The chair is tucked into the window’s curve, and no one has yet drawn the curtains. The dark glass reflects the back of the chair, the very crown of Adam’s bowed head, and the glow of the tall lamp drawn up beside him. Ronan raps his knuckles twice against the doorjamb and Adam looks up.

“What are you doing, hiding up here?”

Adam shrugs blandly, “I assumed my usual chair would be taken.”

The lamplight takes his dust-coloured skin and hair and spins it into dark gold. Damn Declan. Ronan has a houseful of unwanted guests, and his fingertips ache.

“Come down,” he says, softly, “Opal’s asking for you.” _I’m asking for you. I haven’t seen you all day and want you close._

Blue eyes, dark in the library’s shadows, consider him levelly. It’s hard to stand still beneath that gaze. Ronan fidgets with his cuff, stops himself, fidgets. So it goes.

“Is that an order?” Adam asks him finally. Ah. This is a test. Adam, feeling out the boundaries after last night, testing for structural changes, hidden doors.

“It’s a fucking request. Do what you’d like, but –” Ronan runs himself to a stop, huffs abruptly, and slips into the room. Adam watches him cautiously as he closes the door with care; he still has one finger marking the page in his book, like he’ll go back to it any fucking minute. Ronan crosses the room quickly, stands still for a moment in front of Adam. He’s so close that the tips of their shoes brush. Ronan softens himself at the knees, leans forward just a little. Lets their knees brush, too.

“Ronan,” Adam says, low. He swallows, and Ronan tracks the movement of his throat, “There are – you have guests.” He doesn’t say _someone could walk in here any minute_ , but Ronan knows what he means. He curls his hand deliberately around Adam’s wrist, tucks one finger, over Adam’s, between the pages of his book.

“Come down just for a bit,” Ronan whispers, and kisses him softly. Adam sways towards him when he pulls back, one of a magnetic pair. “I want to see you.”

A tiny, private smile curves Adam’s mouth up at one end.

“Ok,” he says. Easy as breathing, “Just for a bit.”

Ronan’s chest feels strange and light and fluttery all the way back to the drawing room.

Of course, then Declan fucks it up.

“Where’s Richard?” he says, peering around the room like the man will fucking materialise.

“He and Sargent are wandering the Americas, I think. Something about climbing a pyramid.”

Declan looks sternly disapproving, which is after all the expression he does best.

“That woman is quite impossible.”

“That woman,” Ronan says definitively, “Is fucking fantastic. I have no idea how Dick convinced her to marry him.”

“Well,” says Declan easily, lounging back in his chair and swirling the whiskey in his glass, “He does have rather a lot of money.”

“You will not,” Ronan tells him precisely, “Say fucking shit about Sargent in my house. I will turn all your precious guests out into the cold, Declan. Don’t. Push me.”

“Good god, Ronan, you’re always so dramatic. In any case, I didn’t bring them here for _me_.”

Ronan feels abruptly cold. Instinctively, he looks first to Opal, still happily ensconced between taffeta skirts on a low couch at the other end of the room, and then, tucked into the window seat behind her, to Adam.

“What is that supposed to mean.”

“It _means_ ,” Declan says, conveying clearly that he knows Ronan knows the answer already, and is deeply irritated that they can’t simply skip over this superfluous paragraph of the conversation, “That more than one of these ladies is unattached, and will come into a very good inheritance when she marries.”

“Delightful,” Ronan grits out, “I’m so glad you have choices.”

“They’re obviously not for _me_ , Ronan.”

“You’re the one obsessed with marriage.”

“For god’s sake, Ronan, it can’t do you any good to be rattling around here on your own all the time. It’s almost worse than when you were galivanting around the continent. You need a family. Something to focus on.”

“I _have_ a family,” Ronan snarls. He’s keeping it quiet – his one nod to decorum – but it’s getting increasingly difficult, “And, in case you’ve lost touch with your accountant, _I run an estate_. _Very. Well_. That’s _plenty_ to ‘focus on’, thank you.”

Declan glances at Opal. He does not, Ronan thinks, notice Adam in the shadows, but it’s probably only a matter of time. His brother has, after all, known him a long time. Dammit.

“Ronan,” Declan says quietly, “You cannot be serious. The girl is…well, who knows _what_ she is, frankly. You need a _real_ family. You need more than dreams.”

“Why?” Ronan hisses, “What we had not good enough for you, then?”

Declan, in an uncommon show of humanity, bites his lip. He studies the dark liquid in his glass, tipping it to and fro.

“What we had was fine. But I want more than that. And so should you.”

Ronan is about to respond with something cutting and almost certainly ill-advised, but there is a light cough and he looks up to find Miss Ashley Ingram standing before the fireplace.

“The brothers Lynch,” she says, smiling, “I wonder, might I steal you away, Ronan, for a song?”

Ronan wants to say no, of course. But he can sense the tension in Declan’s shoulders and…for fuck’s sake, they’re going to be here all week.

He gets to his feet and offers Miss Ingram his arm, like a fucking adult.

“Only if you will accompany me,” he tells her, pointedly ignoring Declan and his condescending bloody eyebrows.

From the shadows by the window, he imagines he can feel Adam’s gaze upon him as he crosses the room. He tries not to think about it, about standing here in front of all these half-strangers and his psychopomp and a man, _this_ man – the man – he cares for, hearing people go quiet as his voice stretches out, filling the corners of the room with heartbreak and lost love.

He can’t go to Adam’s room. He shouldn’t. He can’t. He _won’t_ go, because the house is full of near-strangers and Declan and if he’s found sneaking out of the tutor’s room at four in the morning, they will not understand. Though they will make some other fairly accurate and damning assumptions.

So, he won’t go.

Except.

Except that none of his uninvited guests are actually staying in the westernmost wing. Nobody ever uses the guest rooms here, because putting other people near Ronan when he’s asleep is just asking for screaming and trouble. Not to mention the rooms of dream things gathering dust on the floor above. Wouldn’t want anyone accidentally sleepwalking into the warm embrace of a carnivorous chair, or affectionate song, or that really peculiar – and Ronan does not use this word lightly – and menacing wardrobe with nothing but a huge lever inside of it, which nobody is game to pull in case it does…something.

So the corridor outside is silent and empty, all but one room, and nobody will hear him but –

He shouldn’t. He shouldn’t.

Adam is leaving tomorrow.

He will.

Adam had slipped out of the drawing room unobserved while the gathered crowed was still clapping and calling for an encore. That beautiful, heartrending song. He could still feel it humming in his finger bones. Just once, as Ronan sang, his eyes had found Adam’s across the room. He must have known that Adam was already looking at him – everybody was – but Adam felt that gaze like fingertips skimming his cheek, and he had had to look away, certain somebody would see and realise all that hung between them.

He’d returned to his room, packed, stripped, gotten into bed, and now lay still, staring up at the canopy. He’s been staring at it for a long time. An hour ago he’d heard the party downstairs disband, voices in the foyer, feet on the stairs. He’d held his breath for breathlessly good reasons as one pair of feet, distinctive in their weight and measure, passed in front of his door, stopped, moved on. He didn’t breathe again until he heard Ronan’s door close.

How was it supposed to work, this messy, emotional, physical tangle of a thing? There were no books about it, no stories, no rules. Romance was not supposed to work this way. Courting was something done in public, then marriage, _then_ kisses, bodies, heat. At least that was what he had supposed. And then there was the other thing. What they were.

He’d looked across that drawing room tonight, his chest aching, overfull. His stomach had twisted into ungainly, half-painful shapes whenever he thought about Ronan looking back at him, speaking to him, touching him in that room, where other people would see. He still felt the kiss in the library, the almost unbearable intimacy of Ronan’s hand on his, his finger sliding in between the pages of Adam’s book like a filthy promise of very different things. And then the evening ended and he was here, cold and alone and awake and wanting, just four rooms down from the object of his want, and Adam blinks up at the ceiling and thinks: _it will always be like this_.

He tests that reality in his mind.

Well, not _always_ , always. The Barnes is special. Secluded. When they are alone here things will probably be much as they always had been. Not much has changed, in so many ways.

But there will always be times like this, too, when fear of witnesses holds them apart. When he will be alone.

And the thing is that Adam likes women. Not that he’s had much chance to confirm it, but he’s sure none the less. He likes women the same way he likes men, which had been a hard thing to come to terms with about himself, but he’d done it quite some time ago. Only. There are women, and men, and then there is Ronan Lynch, and Adam has come to suspect that he is something different altogether.

He thinks the name – thinks about the person – and feels his heartbeat slip. It isn’t that he’d doubted it. But Adam is calculating, pragmatic. He always has been before. He’d had to know, for himself, that there was not a simpler way. Thick shame warms him as he thinks it – Ronan is so total in his affections, Adam’s caution feels insidious, traitorous, cruel – but he can’t stop himself. To discover that there _is_ no other way, that it is Ronan himself, and not his body or his type, to whom Adam has become attached, sooths him even as it wakes fresh guilt to match the shame.

He will do better, now he knows.

And knowing the truth of his own feelings will make the hardships – secrets, lying, kissing only behind locked doors – bearable. He rolls onto his side and pulls his knees up to his chest, tucking his chin against them. Four doors down, Ronan is lying in his own bed, curled into its empty chill. Adam hopes he is asleep, dreaming sweetly. He pulls the coverlet up over his head and tries again to sleep.

Not five minutes later there is a tap at his door. Adam startles, badly, having missed the scuff of approaching feet. For a long moment he thinks perhaps sleep has found him after all and this is the dream. His father has finally invaded The Barns and now, two stories up, he has no escape.

“Adam,” comes Ronan’s low voice through the door. Adam breathes raggedly, boneless in his relief, then pushes his bedclothes aside and delicately unlatches the door.

Ronan stands in trousers, shirt, bare feet, his dressing gown thrown over the top for warmth. His eyes are avid, hungry, curious as he peers around Adam into his room: the bare dresser, bare rug, the boots lined up neatly beneath a ladder-backed chair. Only the rumpled bed shows signs of disordered, recent occupancy. Adam stands back wordlessly, and Ronan slips inside and slides the latch home.

“Trouble sleeping?” Ronan asks. Routine.

“Yes. You?”

“Yes,” Ronan says, then breaks tradition and kisses him.

Adam pushes up on his toes, closing the spare inches between them, pressing into Ronan’s warmth. Ronan gasps into his mouth and sinks his fingers into Adam’s hair, reeling him in, holding him close. As if Adam is going anywhere. He shoves his cold hands in under Ronan’s dressing gown and shirt, palms against his back, and Ronan gasps again, sharper, shocked, and then laughs delightedly into his mouth, “Fuck,” he mutters, “Fuck, _shhhh_ ,” as if Adam is the one making all this noise, “Don’t make me laugh.”

What a request.

“Are you coming to bed with me?” Adam whispers, soft, into his mouth.

“Yes,” says Ronan instantly, “Yes, I mean, if –”

“I want you to. Come to bed. It’s freezing.” Ronan crowds him backwards until his knees hit the bed and he folds down upon it. He tugs at Ronan’s dressing gown. “Take this off.” Then his trousers, “These, too.”

“I think you like ordering me around,” Ronan whispers.

“I like it better when you do what I say,” and Ronan grins, quick and sharp in the moonlight, and shucks the specified articles. Adam backs across the bed and Ronan follows him, crawling up over his legs until he hovers, poised, above him. Adam reaches out a hand and draws cold fingers down his throat, over his chest, into the deep V of his shirt. Ronan shivers, watching him.

“What do you want?” he whispers. His voice has gone low, rough. Adam feels it in his belly.

“I don’t know, yet,” Adam answers truthfully, unashamed of this, at least, “I’m finding out as I go.”

“You can have anything,” Ronan tells him, a little shaky, “You can do anything you want.”

“Dangerous offer,” Adam quips.

“Yes. I mean it.”

The fabric of Ronan’s shirt is so thin that Adam can see shadows beneath it, the dark hair under his arms, the peak of a nipple when Adam stretches the material taught against his ribs. Ronan is breathing hard, staying perfectly still. Adam flicks the nipple experimentally, through the muslin, and he shudders.

 _What do I want?_ Adam thinks. _For him to miss me. To want me. To make him come apart. To be worth the strain and the risk. To bring him undone._

“What do you like?” he asks into the warm space between them.

Ronan rolls his eyes and huffs, half a laugh. “A lot of things, Parrish.” When he says it, it sounds expansive, dangerous. Like something Adam wants to do. “I like a lot of things.”

“Tell me. Even just one. Or tell me about your dreams,” he swallows, feeling suddenly hyper aware of the feel of cloth against his naked skin, of Ronan’s knee at his hip, bleeding heat through his nightshirt. “Tell me what I do to you.”

“Jesus Christ.” Ronan bows over him to rest his forehead against Adam’s shoulder, below his good ear. He’s silent for so long that Adam gets nervous. He runs a slow hand up Ronan’s arm, curling his fingers protectively about his shoulder.

“You don’t have to,” Adam says, “Obviously. We can just –” he edges his fingers towards Ronan’s neck, touches his ear, his jaw. Thinks about touching his mouth.

“What if I scare you off?” Ronan mumbles. Adam can feel the words against his skin as he hears them, “What if I say something and you think it’s – or I ask you to do something and you think there’s –” he stops again, and takes a deep, shuddering breath against Adam’s neck, as though fortifying himself for battle. He turns his head slightly and deliberately, and whispers clearly into the quiet, “I don’t want you to think there’s something wrong with me, or that I’m damaged or…disgusting, somehow. You haven’t done this before. I’m afraid if you think about it, you’ll change your mind.”

Adam feels very still inside, listening to Ronan speak. As though he is smoothing out and calming to compensate for the raw wretchedness in Ronan’s voice. He moves his hand carefully over the soft fuzz at Ronan’s nape, sooths the skin above the only eyebrow he can reach.

“Really?” Adam asks, trying this tack first because he is, at heart, a bit of a prick, “You were quite descriptive last night.”

But Ronan will not be teased.

“ _Adam._ ” He tangles a hand in Adam’s nightshirt, body held tense above him like jockey waiting for the starting gun.

“I can’t promise what I don’t know,” Adam whispers, “But I know you. The only disgusting things about you are your table manners, sometimes your sense of humour. And I don’t think you’re damaged, not in that way. I don’t think either of us are. There’s nothing wrong with you, Ronan. I can’t tell you that I’ll like everything you tell me, because I don’t know that I will. But I want to know what you want. I want to understand you. I want to give you what I can.”

This seems like an enormous speech. But everything he’s said is true, and Adam feels as if he has perhaps atoned, a little, for his traitorous, shameful pragmatism of an hour ago. Ronan takes a deep, shuddering breath and presses his forehead into Adam’s shoulder.

“Your hands,” he whispers into Adam’s shirt, “I dream about your hands a fucking lot. All over me. Your nails on my back. Leaving bruises, sometimes. I think about them in my mouth, or stroking me off,” he shudders, voice dropped so low it’s barely a breath between them, “In my ass. Do you know about that? It’s one of the ways men fuck. Hurts if it’s done badly. But with you… Fuck. I want your fingers inside me. I want to be as close to you as I can get.”

Adam did not know about that.

He thinks about pressing his fingers into the secret spaces of Ronan’s body and his chest hitches unevenly. He wonders if Ronan feels it, or if he’s too focussed on getting the words out, bridging the space between them. He wonders if Ronan has ever said these things to anyone else. He hopes not. He thinks perhaps not. It doesn’t sound like he’s had much practice. Adam splays his fingers over Ronan’s skull, trailing down over his nape, feeling overfull and with nowhere yet to put it all.

“Kiss me,” he breathes, “God, Lynch. Kiss me.”

Ronan lifts his head and meets his gaze head on. The kiss, when it comes, is almost tentative, slow. He noses sweetly over Adam’s jaw, his cheek, shares breath with him for a moment before softly closing the distance. Adam’s hands come up of their own accord to lace at the back of his neck and he feels something in Ronan relax as he pulls him close. They kiss for a long time, until Adam’s breath is shallow and Ronan’s arms are trembling with the effort of holding himself up. Adam unweaves his fingers and pushes gently against Ronan’s shoulder until he rolls off him and settles on his side, noses almost touching, face to face.

“Mr Lynch,” Adam says softly.

Ronan smiles crookedly, “Parrish.”

Adam moves his hand up Ronan’s shoulder, the fine stuff of his shirt bunching and evening out beneath his palm, over the collar, warming against the smooth skin of his neck and then prickling over stubble, along his jaw, over his cheek. He comes to a stop with his fingers splayed, thumb resting barely at the corner of Ronan’s mouth. Ronan is watching him, holding very still. Adam brushes his thumb back and forth a few times, catching on stubble. He shifts his hand again to run the pad of his thumb across Ronan’s lower lip. Ronan’s eyes flutter shut and he opens his mouth.

Adam has never imagined this. That makes him feel boring, suddenly, a different kind of shame. What other glories await him, that he has never even thought to desire? Ronan, with his wild past and his wonderous, fantastical brain has already thought of a thousand things that Adam, in his poor, small, narrow life, has never even dreamed of. He _wants_ all of those things abruptly, with a desperation and a longing so strong it feels barely containable. Or maybe it’s not sudden. Perhaps it’s been there all along, only now, for the first time, he allows himself to feel it.

He slides his thumb into Ronan’s mouth. He feels the slick of his inner lip, the smooth surface of his teeth and the sharp edge as he pushes over them, deeper, and then shudders as Ronan meets him with his tongue. Ronan’s lips close around his knuckle and Adam groans involuntarily, feeling sparks thunder in his chest, blood rush from his head. At the sound, Ronan grabs for him; a thoughtless, graceless motion, as though he is unable to keep his hands from Adam’s body a moment longer. He laves his tongue over the pad of Adam’s thumb as he fists his hand in his shirt. Adam crushes their mouths together. It’s messy because his thumb is still in the way, and he uses it to tug Ronan’s mouth open again; when Ronan moans, Adam feels it all through his chest. Hands, he decides, should always be involved in kisses. It is a travesty that he has never even thought to want this before.

Ronan’s hand is everywhere, sliding over his back, his shoulder, his arse. His other is trapped between their bodies and he uses it to stroke haphazard lines over Adam’s chest, to press a splayed handprint against his belly. Ronan runs his palm, hard, down Adam’s thigh, breaching the border between nightshirt and bare flesh, and Adam’s breath hitches against his mouth. It tugs the breath from his body to be manhandled like this, gently but easily, his knee pulled up to drape over Ronan’s hip, a comforting squeeze at his ankle before Ronan pushes his palm up again, fingers splayed so that his thumb traces a burning line up the inside of Adam’s thigh, under his shirt. Adam feels it catch in the hair between his legs, and his breath stutters with the closeness of Ronan’s hand to the place he suddenly wants most to be touched.

Ronan pulls away from the kiss, but only to turn his head into Adam’s palm, catching the pads of two fingers against his mouth, and opening eagerly when Adam pushes them in. It’s suddenly unbearable to have only one useable hand, and he uses his knee to roll them again. He feels uncertain for a moment, hovering above Ronan with his fingers in his mouth, and then Ronan runs both hands up his thighs, under his shirt, to grip his hips and pull Adam down against him, and Adam goes.

“Fuck,” he whispers, half wondering, “ _Ronan_.”

Ronan is laid out below him, flushed, sweat-soaked. The thin muslin of his shirt, stuck to his body, is somehow more obscene than his naked flesh would be. Adam can feel him through two layers of fragile cloth, hard, between his thighs. When he presses down Ronan’s eyelashes flutter and he arches back against the bed, groaning around Adam’s fingers. Adam grinds down again, and Ronan’s hands spasm on his hips, pulling him into a hard, sloppy rhythm. Adam tugs uselessly at the shirt trapped between them.

“Ronan,” he whispers, bending to kiss him around his fingers, dragging them spit-slick from Ronan’s mouth and down his throat and further until they’re caught by the V of his shirt, “Ronan, please.” Ronan’s hands leave his body to tangle hard in his hair, and he kisses him, swift, and then releases him with a groan, shoving at Adam, cursing, fighting the sweat-damp fabric that clings to him like another skin. He moves to pull Adam’s shirt off, too.

“No,” Adam says, pushing him back down, a hand splayed over the bare span of his ribs, “I like you like this.”

“Fucker,” Ronan swipes sweat from his eyes with his forearm, grabs the front of Adam’s shirt to haul him down, “Fuck. _Adam_.”

Adam fits his hand between them and Ronan swears gloriously and profusely into his mouth.

Is this too fast? Adam doesn’t know, he’s never done more than kiss one of the townie girls, and only twice. Even if he had done more, he thinks that this would still be different. Ronan is different; because he’s Ronan, obviously, but also because they _know_ one another. Before last night, Adam had never touched more of Ronan Lynch than anyone might, except to dress a wound. But it had not felt strange to do it, to lay his palm against the bare skin of Ronan’s chest, twine his fingers in the dark hair there, feel a nipple peaking beneath the pad of his thumb. It had been natural to touch him, an obvious extension of everything that had already built between them. If it was fast, to go from kissing to touching to whatever tonight might bring, it did not feel so. It felt inevitable, and as though, looking back on it, they had been approaching this very moment – Ronan’s hands on his ribs, his thighs – for months.

And Adam knows something else, too. He knows that tomorrow he will step up into a carriage that will take him far from The Barns, and Opal, and Ronan, over the sea and back to where he began, to the place he had hoped never to return. And when he goes, he wants to have this to take with him. The thought of it – and he has thought of it, often, in the past twenty four hours, trying to imagine what it would be like, trying not to let himself blush over the images it produced in his mind – is not enough. He wants a memory, verifiable knowledge of the shape of Ronan’s hands against his stomach, the scent of his release on Adam’s skin. He wants it to take with him, to shield him against the inevitable chill of Henrietta, and his mother’s flat stare.

“You, too,” Ronan mutters, “Here,” and shows Adam how to wrap his fingers around the both of them, adding his own rough grip.

It’s so much. It’s not nearly everything Adam wanted to do, but it feels overwhelming enough for now. His most secret skin slides against Ronan’s, against his own long fingers and Ronan’s calloused palm. It’s almost painfully dry, until Ronan swipes his thumb through the wetness at Adam’s tip and Adam chokes, kisses him, learns fast and echoes the gesture. Ronan swears beneath him, tensing and thrashing about, and then Adam, impulsively, closes his teeth around one nipple and Ronan throws his arm across his face to bite back a shout as he spills over their joined hands. Slicker, now, Adam reaches for himself again, and is poised on the edge when Ronan look up at him, digging his fingers into the meat of Adam’s thigh, and breathes, “Adam, God.” And Adam’s release collapses him forwards, breathing like he’s run for miles.

Ronan kisses his nose, his eyebrows, his forehead, his ear, anything he can get to. He coaxes Adam’s face up and mouths along his jaw. Adam opens for him with the same instinct that drives a flower to turn and follow the sun’s path, thoughtless and warm, and Ronan kisses him softly and with great thoroughness.

“Adam,” he breathes, “Adam, Jesus.”

“You’re beautiful,” Adam murmurs, groggy and already half asleep, “Stay here.”

“I’m supposed to be telling you that,” Ronan laughs at him, dragging his fingertips down Adam’s cheek, “I don’t want you to go.”

Adam feels the weight of reality pressing, sudden and inexorable, down upon him again. He shoves it viciously back.

“Don’t talk about it,” he orders, “Just pretend it isn’t happening,” then softer, “Pretend you can stay.”

Ronan twines an arm around his neck, hauling him close, and presses a kiss against his forehead. Then he laughs.

“I can’t believe you kept your shirt on and made me take mine off. Filthy fuck.” He sounds impressed. Adam smiles against his collarbone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I hope that eased a little of the tension. Be gentle with me, it was my first time (and Adam's!).
> 
> **A note on period-typical homophobia in this fic.**
> 
> In fiction, there are two main routes you can take when dealing with oppression: either write it as-is for a given time and place, or invent a world where it doesn't exist. Honestly, I found the thought of writing this fic true to history too hideous to seriously contemplate. For context, in the UK sodomy was punishable by _the death penalty_ until 1861. _The death penalty_. That's important LGBTIQ+ history to know. But it's also _awful_ to think about, and I felt that to write characters who were trying to deal with that reality would take more attention and careful handling than I was able to give this fic. I mean, if you're lucky enough to live in a society where the legality of your relationships is dictated only by consent, can you imagine what that must be like? To try to have a healthy relationship, to love someone, with that risk hanging over your head? I realy, truly can't, and that makes me incredibly lucky, because those risks certainly are not ancient history everywhere in the world.
> 
> However, I also opted not to go in the other direction and make homosexual relationships commonplace and open. This is because altering attitudes and laws to this extent would have had far-reaching consequences for the rest of society, like changing inheritance laws, and the status of women. I basically decided not to do that because I get really into world-building and forget that I'm supposed to be writing a story.
> 
> So, in this fic, sodomy is not illegal. It's heavily frowned upon, and there's a lot of pressure to marry someone of the opposite sex and stay in the closet, but same-sex sex won't land you in jail or a mental asylum, or get you murdered by the state (interestingly, marriage wasn't actually defined as being between a man and a woman until 1866 in the UK, meaning that same-sex marriages did occasionally occur). Adam has reasonable anxieties about his future and his career, should anyone discover his proclivities, but he doesn't have to worry about literally being put to death for falling in love with a man. It's not perfect at all, but it was a middle ground I felt equipped to handle.
> 
> Also important: FYI/lest those of us who no longer have to live with it ever forget, _homosexuality is still illegal, and punishable by an array of horrifying things, in many parts of the world_. It's really important that the recent advent of legal same-sex marriage in many places does not lull us into thinking that things are fine now. They aren't, and we all need to take action wherever possible to change things for the better.
> 
> /note.
> 
> As ever, your reading, commenting, kudos-ing, etc. makes me incredibly happy. Thank you to everyone who commented on the last chapter particularly.
> 
> Happy reading - let me know what you think.
> 
> ~  
> Next chapter: a reluctant journey, an unfortunate reunion, an unresolved mystery.


	12. It is a long way to Ireland.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The solace of the exquisitely ordinary, and a reluctant traveller, duty-bound.
> 
> _“You’ll miss us,” she said, firmly._  
>  _“Yes,” he told her honestly, “Every day.”_  
>  _“Every fucking day,” she corrected sternly._  
>  _“Yes. I will.”_  
> 

When he wakes at dawn Ronan is gone, and the bed around him is rumpled and cold. Adam lies on his back in this, the sole bastion of life in his room, and tries to breathe around the disappointment. Somehow, knowing it was coming had not made it more bearable.

He feels sticky with sweat and something even less comfortable. His shirt is a disaster. How had he not thought about this? He, Adam Parrish, stickler for cleanliness and rules. Last time he had been insulated by the general chaos of Ronan’s room, of Ronan himself, and besides, they hadn’t gone far enough to make much of a mess. He hadn’t thought about the practicalities. What would the maids think when they came for his linens and his laundry? How could he ring for a bath in this state? Once again, the cold facts of what they are doing press in around him. But this time he is more prepared. He knows what he wants. He knows why he’s doing this.

And he is not in it alone. He’s reminded of this five minutes later when a maid knocks at his door to tell him there is a bath in Master Lynch’s room, and would he like to use it. Ronan is already gone when he slips through the door, and again disappointment unfurls in Adam’s chest. But the bath still steams by the fireplace, as though it has been freshly drawn, and the note folded beside it on a stool says simply _You know where my laundry basket is_. So he’s not the only one thinking about this, after all. Something settles in him, and he feels again the now-familiar shame, this time for assuming that Ronan would not, in his casual, _leave it, Parrish_ way, extend his circle of protection to include them both. He is not very good at this, Adam thinks. He hopes he’ll get better.

Adam sinks into the bath, breathing in the scent of Ronan’s soap and the faint hint of his cologne, and lets his head slide beneath the water.

Breakfast is a strange kind of torture.

Adam is used to it being just the four of them: Ronan, Opal, Mrs Sargent and himself. But Mrs Sargent has been banished to below stairs, Opal to her nursery, and the table is packed elbow to elbow with last night’s party, speaking over-loud and laughing and making plans that include the master of the house but not children or working women or school teachers. Adam makes up a plate at the sideboard, and when he looks up his eyes slide unerringly to Ronan’s where he sat, distant and dark and cool, at the head of the table. Ronan’s gaze is already upon him, and for a moment, Adam catches in it an echo of his own sadness. Last night, yes, but not this. They will never have this.

Adam ducks his head takes his breakfast to the schoolroom.

The coach would be here at ten. Opal seemed distracted, though whether this was due to his imminent departure, Ronan’s spiralling mood, or the unaccustomed thrum of people in her home, Adam couldn’t tell. He went through the lessons he had planned out for her in his absence, repeated his mandate on bibliophagia – _no_ – and explained again, when she asked, that yes, he did have to leave, but he would certainly be back. When? He didn’t want to give her a date, in case he was forced to extend his stay. But. _Soon_ , he promised, _As soon as I possibly can_.

“You’ll miss us,” she said, firmly.

“Yes,” he told her honestly, “Every day.”

“Every fucking day,” she corrected sternly.

“Yes. I will.”

Ronan had been called away, on farm business or Declan business, or the complicated task of entertaining ten surprise guests.

When he goes upstairs for his bag, Adam finds another note, slipped underneath his door.

 _Come back_.

He folds it into the inner pocket of his coat and feels stupid, and sentimental, and relieved.

Adam goes. He hates it, but he has always been better at doing what he should than what he wants.

And it is, as Ronan (or Opal) would say, fucking awful. Predictably.

Over six days, by coach, rail and ferry, Adam travels first to Dublin, then Liverpool, and on past London. Ronan had offered to write ahead to friends and have him stay with them, but Adam didn’t wish to become snared in London’s messy tangle. He wanted this journey to be as fast, as unemotional, as bloodless as possible. And he had feared, too, that spending time with people who loved and knew Ronan would expose them. He imagined being far from him, being forced to speak about him and Opal, and was convinced that anyone who heard him would know, instantly, what he felt and what they were to one another.

On the morning of the seventh day, Adam alighted from the coach before Henrietta’s wide, wrought-iron gates. The coachman handed down his bag and Adam set off. Henrietta was smaller than The Barnes, more traditional by far. The gravel drive led straight and true to the front of the house, and Adam slipped around the back to the kitchen door, as he’d always done, and rang the bell.

When Cook answered she blinked at him a moment, as short sighted as ever, and he had to introduce himself.

“Adam? Little Adam Parrish! Come in, come in, sit down and let me look at you. My, you’ve grown, a great strapping young thing. And look at your fine suit! Your mam will be so proud.”

“How is she?” Adam ventured, over tea and thick brown toast.

“Well,” Cook said awkwardly, “You know how it is. She’ll be better for seeing you, I’m sure.”

Adam smiled politely, because they both knew well that if his mother had not asked to see him in a decade, it was unlikely to bring her any particular joy now.

“Mr Smythe’s letter said she was to move into one of the old workman’s cottages. I intended to call on him for directions.”

The conversation did not much improve from this point. Laid out beside his life now, at The Barns, Adam felt keenly all the ways that Henrietta was thin and sparse and cold. Was it just that he had a place, now, a role in a household that was genuinely valuable? Where _he_ was genuinely valued, by Opal, by Mrs Sargent, not least of all by Ronan? If he’d stayed, once his father could no longer harm him, might he have found his way to warmth and companionship here, too? Or was it the special magic of The Barnes and the strange family that Ronan Lynch had built around himself there, which allowed Adam, also strange, apart, lonesome in some essential way, to flourish?

Henrietta was still beautiful, formal gardens still lush and green. But it felt small, now, and its loveliness superficial. He itched to leave it as soon as he had arrived. They passed him around from Cook, to housekeeper, to butler, and he smiled politely, and drank more tea, and gave what news he had of London and Ireland and the wider world. When pressed about his situation and The Barnes, he said only that he was tutor to one child, that the grounds were large and beautiful, the family good and wealthy, and that he was content in his work. And they, in turn, asked no further.

It was nearing the luncheon bell when Adam found himself on narrow dirt path, sweeping the edge of one of the further pastures and down towards the very stream that had, so long ago, spat up his father’s body onto its grassy banks. The cottage nestled into its curve was dim and low and small; Adam had to duck his head to enter. Inside it was a front room the width of the cot, with a single door in the far wall leading to, he supposed, a bedroom. The floor was bare, and the furniture the usual strange, old-fashioned assortment of things too functional to throw away, but too uncomfortable or ugly to keep at the main house.

His mother looked like that, too.

Adam did not realise, until he saw her, that he had remembered her in any particular way. But looking down at her thin, pinched face, the taught tangle of her birdlike fingers in her lap, he thought: _bigger. Stronger. More aloof._ Had she always been this small? Was it only his smallness that had made her seem huge? Not huge like his father, but looming always one step behind him, watching his movements with cool, impassive grey eyes.

 _I suppose this is what it is to return to a home you’ve long outgrown_.

Where, up at the house, their questions had been polite and true to form, hers were listless, barely interrogatory. He repeated the same neat points about his living situation. She said, “So you’re well paid, then?”

He nodded, wearily, feeling weight settle on his shoulders.

“Do you need money, ma’am?”

She snorted.

“Look at this place. Tossed out with the trash like used furniture.”

Adam felt a wash of shame for thinking the same thing, and then the reverse, a stillness, because it was irrational to be ashamed of what was true.

“I’ll help you get settled. We’ll make the best of it.” There were obvious limits to this plan, but he would try. “I can’t stay very long. A week at most. I have to get back to my pupil.”

It’s been ten days, and his back aches from sleeping on a palette on the floor. _I’ve grown soft_ , Adam thinks.

He doesn’t have a specific destination in mind when, after cleaning up the lunch things as his mother dozes on the couch, he puts on his coat. He knows where his feet will take him, though. He gives the stables a wide berth, not wishing to see the stablemaster – _his_ old master – in his good wool coat with no patches, his sleek black hat. In this place he feels every word his father ever said to him, needling at his skin. _Skulking in corners and_ reading _! You ungrateful, jumped-up brat! Look at me when I talk to you!_ Adam’s gratitude has always flown in the wrong direction: away from his parents, his unseen master and mistress, the thin cot above the stables, and towards forests, school, the Irish countryside.

It’s only when he hears water and looks down to find himself on the edge of a narrow, sluggish brown stream that he realises he’s come too far. Or…something. He climbs back up the slope, wondering how he could have come so far around without noticing, and –

There are the stables. On the other side of a wide, familiar lawn. He turns back to look down a weedy slope, thick with dandelion leaves and other untamed things.

There’s not a tree in sight.

When he gets back to the cottage he feels flushed, feverish.

“Mother, what happened to the forest?”

“The forest?”

“Yes, you know, the little wood, down the hill from the stables. Where the stream runs.” He can’t quite bring himself to say ‘where my father died’.

She looks at him with puzzlement woven in between the perpetual creases of malcontent. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snaps. And she doesn’t.

Neither does anybody else.

The forest where Adam had played and read and sat and walked and thought, where he had run, limping and frozen, and hidden, the forest with whom – with which? With _what_? – he had so long ago made a pact, is…gone. Vanished. Never has been at all.

The facts of its once-was remain: his father (still dead), his release from Henrietta (still occurred) and his bond (the rustle of leaves when he turns a card, the _nudge_ to move a stone, clear a creek, prune back an overly enthusiastic vine). But the trees he had known like the back of his hand are gone, and no sign of their unruly roots remains.

In the end, he stays five weeks and change, not accounting for the two weeks of cumulative travel time. On the last night of his journey from The Barnes, with a hot mix of guilt and pragmatism, Adam had stitched the money for his return travel into the lining of his coat. Now, it’s all that he has left.

But it’s alright. It’s enough. It will get him home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I re-read this chapter and felt just exhausted on Adam's behalf (although, world being what it is, perhaps the exhaustion was there already and the chapter just fit?). 
> 
> I hope you're all taking very good care of yourselves and other people right now, we all need it.
> 
> ~  
> Next week: Return, reunion, catastrophe, confession.
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading and commenting and kudos-ing this fic. It means so much to me, really truly. I'm sorry I'm behind on answering comments - I'll catch up by the next chapter, I promise! (I have read them all, though, and they were lovely).


	13. To get back again to you: part I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A warm homecoming, an uncertain welcome, a bad shock.
> 
> _“He said I could visit,” Opal tells Mrs Sargent eagerly, “There are cows and…little cows._ Dereliquit vitulos aureos. Et agnus _.” She looks at Adam for help.  
>  “Calves,” he says, “Lambs – small sheep, infants.”  
> “La-mbbbb-s,” she rolls the ‘b’ in her mouth, “We’ll see them.” She says it definitively, a small empress directing her court._

Because he had stayed away so much longer than anticipated, nobody is expecting him. Adam arrives unannounced and slips up to his room before anyone sees. He climbs out of his travelling clothes and washes briefly, pulling on fresh things. In the back of his mind is a knot of feeling which began to warm and uncurl as soon as the carriage turned onto the drive and he smelled clear, familiar air, the scent of moss and mist and new growth. When Adam touches on it, he can admit that his clothes matter, the state of his hair matters, his clean face and hands and collar and cuffs matter for the same reason that he has butterflies in his stomach.

 _Ronan_.

Adam wonders where he is. The problem with an estate this size is that, in the middle of a warm afternoon in late spring, he could be anywhere. Ronan is probably out in the fields or in the barns or talking with the gardeners or in his study or in the woods with Opal or in the library with a book or riding or walking or –

Adam goes to find Mrs Sargent, whose schedule is somewhat more predictable. He knocks on the door to the housekeeper’s room and when he steps inside Mrs Sargent _beams_ at him and presses his hands warmly between her own, and Adam feels something in his chest settle squarely back into place.

“Why Mr Parrish, what a start you gave me. You’ve been gone so long we weren’t sure you’d be back for Christmas!” Adam feels the first claw of guilt, but Mrs Sargent lays one firm, brown hand over his own and says, in a way that brooks no argument, “You stayed away no longer than you had to, I’m sure. It’s good to have you back. Your little pupil has been such a scamp, wild thing that she is. And Mr Lynch, I’m afraid, has not been in the best of moods, but you’re well used to that by now.”

Only pure will keeps Adam from pressing her relentlessly. Instead he manages to ask about broader things – the farm, the house, the lives and loves of various servants – because he’s been gone almost two months. A lot can happen in that time. He keeps up a steady flow of precise, targeted questions about everyone except Ronan Lynch, and hopes that doesn’t give anything away.

When it’s time for tea he goes out with Mrs Sargent to take it on the terrace. When Opal bounds up from the garden and sees him sitting at the table, she freezes for a second, and Adam’s heart stops. Then she grins, wide enough to split her face, and only his quick reflexes save the tea things from an inglorious demise. She clings to him, arms tight around his neck and booted hooves dangling feet above the ground and he hugs her tightly, spins her around so she laughs, and finally sets her down again so he can tousle her hair and tell her that he’s sure she’s grown.

“Ronan is on the farm,” she tells him. Adam doesn’t know whether he was being obvious, or if she knows him that well, or if it’s just something she happened to be thinking about at that moment, “ _Vaccarum **[1]**_ ,” she shrugs, as though that explains it all.

“He’s never at the house much in the spring,” Mrs Sargent explains, “There are workman’s cottages in the far fields, and he often stays there with the men, for convenience.”

Adam tries to look pleasantly interested. His disappointment makes the scones taste stale.

“He said I could visit,” Opal tells Mrs Sargent eagerly, “There are cows and…little cows. _Dereliquit vitulos aureos_. _Et agnus_.” She looks at Adam for help.

“Calves,” he says, “Lambs – small sheep, infants.”

“La-mbbbb-s,” she rolls the ‘b’ in her mouth, “We’ll see them.” She says it definitively, a small empress directing her court.

“We’ll have to wait until it’s convenient,” Adam tells her. His heart is trying to escape through his mouth. _Convenient._ Every part of him thrums with impatience. He wants to _see Ronan_. He wants it _now_. “I’m sure they’re very busy with their work. Perhaps we could go on Sunday, after the men come back from church.” That’s three whole days away; surely Ronan will come home before then. It shouldn’t be this excruciating. He’s already waited more than seven weeks.

Of course, this is exactly why it _is_ excruciating. Adam feels it again, the wanting. Had he even known what the word meant, before these past weeks? What a curse. What a revelation. What a wonder.

Something big has changed in Adam’s absence; only a month and a half or so, he knows, but it feels much longer. Perhaps it’s only spring, but the house seems louder, brighter, more excitable. Something about it unsettles him. It’s two days before he finds out why.

Ronan has not come back to the house. Adam sinks into the rhythm of The Barnes like a swimmer diving into a well-known lake: it’s different every time, and it’s work, but it’s _good_ work, and he is satisfied. Still, he lies awake longer than he ought, listening and trying not to listen for a familiar tread in the hall. _Does he know I’m back?_ Gossip flies around the estate at breakneck speed. _Is he waiting for me?_

While he was gone he’d sent a few letters. The first, just a note to say he was there and safe, and to give his contact details. The second, addressed to Ronan but to be passed on to Opal and Mrs Sargent, to say that his one week must turn into two. The third, yet again prolonging his expected date of departure, brief with the weight of things he either could not say or did not wish to: that he missed Ronan like a limb, that he wanted achingly to come home, that just three weeks at Henrietta and he had begun already to recognise the pinch of his mother’s exhaustion around his own mouth, the hunch of his father’s bitter rage in his shoulders. Mrs Sargent had replied with reassurance, and good wishes for his mother’s prospects and his imminent return. Ronan had replied first to acknowledge his arrival, in words which had been brisk but faintly sweet; then, to approve his delay, brisker and a little sharp; and finally just a note that said: _received_. And Adam had felt the full inadequacy of written language crashing down around him. He’d folded the notes into his breast pocket, hoping to catch that illusive scent of mist and moss and leather, The Barnes, Ronan, home.

And now he _is_ home, and he _feels_ that he is, but still, Ronan is missing. _Received_. Was he angry when he wrote that? Bitter? Sad? Annoyed? Adam had felt all those things when he read it, and then over again when he thought about _why_ he was reading it, the woman who was sitting placidly in the rocking chair by the window, doing slow piecework in her lap, expecting him to sort out her affairs. She had not asked for his money or time, not directly, but she had expected it with the passive entitlement of someone who believed herself overdue. Mrs Parrish had not had a good life, a nice life, the life she wanted. She felt cheated of the things she had been owed, and expected him to make up the difference.

And Adam had. Not because he felt any particular filial duty, or indeed any real guilt about its absence, but because Adam wanted the same thing now that he had wanted then: freedom, and to be beholden to no person but himself. He would pay this unofficial debt because that would close the account, and then he would be free. Once he understood his place in the design, it was easy, and Adam had moved furniture, settled bills, bought supplies as far as his meagre savings would allow, and then climbed back into the coach with his few belongings and left Henrietta for good, conscience a clean, bright page.

But Ronan’s missive, and his absence, gnaws at him. He can’t sleep.

Because Opal wishes to do an experiment involving oil, and water, and possibly matches, Adam is in the kitchen. Because he is in the kitchen, he hears almost the whole story before he has realised what it means, and why he absolutely cannot bear to be listening to this.

He can’t think. When he had seen Miss Ingram the night before he left, he had not sensed anything between them. There had been the duet, a novel-worthy excuse for lingering stares and hidden meanings, but if there’d been anything to see, he hadn’t noticed it.

But perhaps that was because the only person he had noticed Ronan looking at was himself. And of course that night he’d been…distracted. Ronan hadn’t mentioned it in any letter; then again, Ronan hadn’t mentioned much in any letter.

 _A lot can happen in two months_ , says a flat, placating voice in his head that sounds a lot like his mother. Would it have been different, if he’d come home as planned? Written more often and more fully? Not stayed away so long?

He turns this new fact in his head, a fresh part he can’t make fit with the whole he knows. A whole which had felt so steady and real and _possible_ when he’d left, and now feels fragile as spun glass in his long hands. Ronan is so all-consuming, so focussed, so _loyal_. He pictures the man he knows and cannot imagine him for a moment giving in to society’s pressures and committing himself to a loveless marriage.

The answers to this paradox are obvious. Either, a) it is not loveless or, b) Adam does not know him at all. Because when he thinks about ‘b’ his heart aches like it’s gripped in a vice and his head feels too light for his shoulders, he focusses on ‘a’. Is it possible that Ronan could have fallen in love with Miss Ashley Ingram? It certainly seems improbable, but then, Ronan _is_ improbable. And quite impossible, too, for that matter. And it is true that he throws himself bodily into everything. If he does love this woman, know himself to love her, then of course he would not hesitate to marry her sooner rather than later. Adam has known from the beginning that this was a possibility. Ronan is wealthy, landed, from a good family. Adam had always known there was a risk that, someday, either for love or pragmatism, he might have to make a more legitimate, legally consecrated match. But he had not expected it would be so soon. They’ve not even known each other a full year, yet.

Adam’s heart spasms again. He had thought they would have more time. He had thought…

But obviously he had been mistaken. He does make mistakes, sometimes. And he has always survived them thus far.

He will just have to survive this one.

[1] cows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a short one today, with a bit of a cliffhanger at the end (not really on purpose, just can't edit the whole thing today). Sorry! You'll just have to check back in a few days :)
> 
> ~  
> Next chapter: imminent upheval, a conversation, a confession.
> 
> And, again, I am so, so sorry that I have not, as promised, replied to comments yet. As I'm sure many of you know all too intimately, times are a little uncertain at the moment and things don't always go as planned. I hope everyone reading this is safe and happy and taking care of themselves, their loved ones and their community.


	14. To get back again to you: part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second half of the last chapter, which I will not summarise for fear of spoilers.
> 
> _“Adam,” Ronan says again. He presses his lips to the knob of Adam’s spine and nuzzles his nose into the hair at his nape, “Will you please fucking look at me, now?”  
>   
>  Adam jerkily shakes his head. Ronan inhales and exhales again, slowly, as though he is trying to control something.  
> _

Adam is not surprised that he can’t sleep. And nor is he surprised, when he has pulled on his dressing gown and boots and made his way out into the heart of the hedge maze, to find Ronan there.

 _Of course_ Ronan is there. Because it’s midnight and Ronan is always somewhere ridiculous at midnight, and Adam’s stupid feet, or heart, or that _thing_ inside of him that nudges him – in really very unpleasant and untenable directions, as it turns out – now has its compass needle set towards one impossible man. Ronan is sitting on one of the stone benches by the little coy pool at the maze’s core. He glances up as Adam rounds the corner and then does the most unbearable thing Adam can think of, and smiles as if he can’t imagine anything or anyone he wants to see more in that moment or, quite possibly, ever.

Adam’s heart cracks.

“I –” he starts. He takes a deep breath. He must do this. Adam is happy to lie about many things, but he cannot lie about this. It’s better to have it out in the open. It will be better to know for sure, so he can understand the depth and severity of his wounds. Perhaps he will bleed to death. A little dramatic, perhaps, but that actually sounds quite peaceful just at present. “I did not expect to find you here.”

Ronan is still smiling at him. He looks almost shy, now he’s tamped down on the initial reaction, glancing up at Adam though his lashes. “Nor I, you. I only just rode back; I haven’t even been into the house yet.” He says, “Good surprise.”

Adam can’t safely speak to that, so he doesn’t. The first hint of puzzlement flickers over Ronan’s brow.

“Will you sit beside me?” he shifts on the bench to make room, but not so much that they would not be pressed together, “I was just thinking about you, and there you are, appearing out of the mist like an elf. I can’t quite believe you’re really back.” Ronan says this in a way that makes the words sound overfull, as though there aren’t actually syllables in English that could convey the breadth of what he truly means.

“I think…” Adam manages, “I’d rather stand, if you don’t mind.”

“No…” Ronan says slowly, “I don’t _mind_ , I suppose. Of course, you may please yourself.”

Adam shoves his hands deep in his pockets. He’s not sure whether it is colder than he’d expected, or if he only _feels_ colder. Ronan is still watching him. That puzzled frown is growing.

“Adam,” he says slowly, “Has something happened? Gossip moves bloody slowly on the farm. Did…” real uncertainty is starting to seep into his voice. He scrubs a hand over the back of his head and glances quickly at Adam again and then away, “Did something happen while you were gone? I heard so little from you...”

Adam nods slowly. He can answer that. He must.

“I heard about Miss Ingram.”

“Did you?” Ronan looks abruptly disinterested, or maybe bored, “About fucking time, I suppose. Her mother and mine were great friends, you know. We’ve known the family forever.”

Adam nods again. He feels rigid and slow, just outside his body, trying to work it with strings. “Congratulations are in order.”

A shrug, “I’ll pass them on if you like.”

“Thank you. I would appreciate that.”

There’s a long pause. Ronan is fidgeting with his cuffs, and frowning, and glancing every now and then at Adam from beneath his lashes. He’s trying to figure out what’s going on, but somehow, improbably, he hasn’t got there yet. Adam feels a little weak in his limbs. It really meant so little, then. It’s a long time since he’s made a mistake so…vast.

“I suppose you will send Opal to school,” he says dully.

Ronan’s head jerks up and he stares full at Adam, “Why should I do that?”

“Well, I don’t suppose Miss Ingram will want her around. A girl not her own.”

“No,” Ronan says, looking at him hard, “Perhaps not. Though I still do not see why that should influence _my_ child-rearing decisions. For God’s sake, Parrish. Do sit the fuck down. You’re giving me a crick in my neck.”

Adam swallows hard. How can it be so difficult? Does Ronan really think… “Lynch, do you really not see how this will change things? How it will change…everything?”

“I certainly hope it does change some things, but I am fast getting the impression that the things _I_ wish to change may be rather different from the things _you_ wish to alter. For example, you seem suddenly hell-bent on getting rid of Opal, which is pretty fucking odd considering you’re practically attached at the hip.”

“ _I_ don’t wish to get rid of her!”

“Well, good!” Ronan throws up his arms, “Neither do I! We’ll keep her here with us and find her an extra tutor to give you some freedom, and everything will be fine!”

“Everything will _not_ be fine, Lynch! Do you not see –” Adam cuts himself off ruthlessly. He scrubs a hand roughly through his hair and pulls at it viciously until Ronan makes to move towards him. “Don’t!” he snaps, and Ronan freezes.

And then he unfreezes and in three quick strides closes the distance between them. Adam shoves at him, feeling helpless and wild, and Ronan grabs his wrists – gently, carefully, so that he knows how easily he could break free – and Adam stills at once, feeling his heart tear straight down the middle. Ronan stares down at him, frown puzzling between his brows, searching Adam’s face like there is some grand fucking mystery afoot and he can’t for the life of him figure it out.

“For God’s sake, Adam!” He snaps finally, “What the hell is going on?”

Adam kisses him.

He surges up onto his toes, and kisses him, and then, when Ronan’s hands go lax and his whole body relaxes towards Adam’s, tears away and claps his hands over his mouth, putting quick feet between them. He can’t breathe. He presses his hand against his mouth and feels Ronan’s lips against his, dry and soft. Reimagines the scent of him – moss and leather and mist – from those fragile, unguarded moments when he had let himself absorb Ronan’s bodily presence in full, back when he had thought it would be his for a long, long while. Everything is different now, knowing it won’t be.

“I’m sorry,” he presses the words into his hands. He has to keep his hands over his mouth or something even worse will escape, something he cannot take back, “I’m sorry. Forgive me. God. I’m sorry.”

“Adam,” Ronan’s voice at his back sounds rusty and raw and tightly controlled. “Adam, what the hell is going on?”

Adam keeps one hand pressed against his mouth and holds the other up to keep Ronan at bay. He peels his fingers carefully from his lips, draws in a slow, deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, clearly this time, “I should not have done that. Forgive me.”

Silence. Then.

“I fucking well will not,” Ronan snaps, “Forgive you for what?”

Adam feels a hand on his shoulder and flinches. It crosses a terrible line, to kiss somebody who is soon to be married to someone else. Who is in love with someone else. But Ronan doesn’t let him go. The grip is gentle. Warm. Familiar. Ronan squeezes his shoulder. He lifts a finger just to touch Adam’s neck, above the collar of his shirt, and Adam shudders.

“Adam,” he says softly, “Adam, please look at me.”

“I can’t,” Adam tells him, just as soft, “Please don’t ask me to.”

“Adam. Adam.”

Adam feels the warmth of a body close at his back. The hand on his shoulder retreats and he thinks, _I can’t stand this any longer_. He thinks, _This must be the moment when something finally breaks_. And in a way that is true.

Ronan’s hands come up to the sides of his neck, brush knuckles upwards over the bare skin of his throat, his jaw. His thumbs touch delicately along Adam’s ears and then he sinks his fingers knuckle-deep into his hair, holding his head gently between his palms. Adam lets out a staggered breath as Ronan presses a kiss to the back of his skull, another to the nape of his neck, and lets his arms succumb to gravity and drift down to wrap tight around Adam’s shoulders from behind. He presses the length of his body against Adam’s back, shoulder to knee. He leans his forehead into the crook of Adam’s neck, below his good ear, and Adam feels him take a deep breath and hold it.

“Adam,” Ronan says again. He presses his lips to the knob of Adam’s spine and nuzzles his nose into the hair at his nape, “Will you please fucking look at me, now?”

Adam jerkily shakes his head. Ronan inhales and exhales again, slowly, as though he is trying to control something.

“Did something happen while you were away?” he asks, quietly.

Haltingly, Adam nods.

“Something pertaining to me? To…us?”

Again, Adam nods. Ronan takes another, shuddery breath, releases it shakily, tightens his arms infinitesimally around Adam’s shoulders.

“Do you…not want me anymore?” Ronan asks, haltingly.

Adam shakes his head unthinkingly, instantly, and Ronan exhales unsteadily and squeezes him tightly.

“Alright,” he says, “Alright. Good. So.”

“I need you to tell me the truth,” Adam says falteringly.

Ronan withdraws his nose from Adam’s neck, and Adam can tell he’s irritated or offended or both, though the arms around him stay gentle and close. “I always tell you the truth.”

“Yes. But you don’t always tell me all of it.”

“Neither do you,” Ronan snaps. This isn’t how Adam intended this to go, but he should’ve known it would spiral quickly.

“I know,” he says, “I know. But, Ronan, this is different. Please tell me you can see that?”

“I’ll tell you what I can see when I know what the hell you’re talking about. Parrish,” he leans his head against Adam’s nape, pushing a little, like a cat angling for a caress, “What is it? Please tell me what’s wrong.”

“I heard about Miss Ingram,” Adam repeats, “In the kitchens.”

“Yes,” Ronan mutters into his collar impatiently, “So you said.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He feels Ronan shrug, “It hadn’t occurred to me. I didn’t think you would be particularly interested.”

Adam feels something cold close around his heart. It surprises him, in a distant sort of way, that his voice is so steady. “You thought I would not be interested to know that you intend to be married?”

Ronan’s arms spasm around him. He leans back a little and clears his throat. “Know something I don’t, Parrish?”

“I very much doubt it,” Adam snaps. Suddenly, he cannot bear the weight of Ronan’s body, and he pulls away from him abruptly. “It’s all they’re talking about in the servant’s quarters,” he adds harshly, “Miss Ingram’s engagement, the new carriage you’ve ordered – Opal,” he almost chokes on it, “Opal going to stay with your friends in London.”

The silence stretches long between them. When Ronan finally speaks, his voice is firm, matter of fact. A tone Adam has rarely heard him use.

“Adam,” he says, “Turn around, Christ almighty. I need to say this to your face.”

Adam takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and turns. He can’t meet Ronan’s eyes, flicking instead to the coy pool, the stone benches, the hedge.

“Alright. Jesus fucking Christ. _Declan_ ,” Ronan says, with supreme emphasis, “Is getting married. To Miss Ashley Ingram, in case that, too, is unclear. _I_ ,” he points a facetious thumb at himself, “Am trying to take my lover on a Grand fucking Tour of Ireland. It was supposed to be a surprise, but I won’t try that again.”

Adam stares at him.

“Someday, we’ll laugh about this, no doubt _ **[1]**_,” Ronan offers wryly, “But I always knew it would get the better of me somehow, sharing a name with that prick.”

“Your brother is engaged to be married to Miss Ingram?” Adam asks. He feels wrung out like a wet rag, blind-sided, whip-lashed.

“Oh for the last time, Parrish –”

“No, I, god. When I heard, I was…god.” Adam makes his way unsteadily to the bench and sits down, leaning his elbows on his knees and covering his mouth again with his hands. Ronan is watching him steadily, from some three paces away. The distance feels calculated. Adam glances at him over his fingers and then quickly away again, staring at the fish floating lazily in the dark water.

“I’m in love with you,” he says abruptly. He removes his hands to say it, and then presses them back over his mouth immediately to keep from adding anything else. It’s been coming such a long time, ever since that night, near five months ago, now, when they’d fought the nightmare together and something had changed. Or, then again, maybe even before that, when they had sat together in the dark, near-strangers still, offering comfort for nightmares they were still too new to share. Sleeping alone, curled on a thin palette before the cold hearth, this truth had gnawed at him like hunger: intrinsic, irritating, opaque. And when he’d heard that it was over, his brief happiness torn down while he wasted hours hauling furniture and bribing newer linens from a housemaid, it had struck him with all the clarity and force of a death-bell. At the corner of his vision he sees Ronan’s eyes go wide.

Adam lets his eyelids fall shut.

The crunch of gravel warns him: rough hands seize his wrists, “Say it again,” Ronan whispers. He is crouched down before Adam’s knees, staring up at him, pale eyes ferocious, unwavering in their intensity, “Fucking – _say it again_.”

Adam allows Ronan to drag his hands down, away from his mouth.

“I’m in love with you. I didn’t realise until – I’m in love with you.”

Ronan kisses him fiercely, and achingly, and sweetly. Only he could do it all at once. His fingers stay wrapped around Adam’s wrists as Adam cradles his face in his hands.

“Fuck,” Ronan breathes, “I fucking – fuck. You horrible man. You couldn’t just – you could’ve _led_ with that.”

Adam laughs into his mouth. The cold air stings his flushed cheeks. “I really couldn’t have.”

“I suppose not,” Ronan grumbles. He kisses him again, quickly, as though he can’t help it, and says, “I love you. I love you, too, God, how do you not know I love you? How could you think I would -?”

“I couldn’t believe it,” Adam admits, “I thought I must’ve been wrong, before. That things had changed while I was away. I thought you must love her, instead of me.”

“No,” Ronan tells him, the way that Adam says ‘no’ sometimes when Ronan has a terrible idea. He turns his head firmly, kissing each of Adam’s palms in turn, “Never. Just you. Only you.”

“Good,” Adam says helplessly, “Good.”

At four am, when Ronan pushes him out of his bed, bundles him into his dressing gown and out into the hall, Adam doesn’t swear at him too much. He can still feel that helpless joy buzzing inside him.

“Did you know I had come back?” Adam asks in the pre-dawn grey. Ronan had returned to the house late, just as Adam had tried to insist he shouldn’t, wanting _to sleep in my own fucking bed, thank you, not that hayloft_ , and Adam is stupidly pleased by it. Probably because he is also in Ronan’s bed.

Ronan had tap-tapped insistently on Adam’s door until he’d stumbled – bleary-eyed from being woken unexpectedly – to open it, and then dragged him down the hall. They’d curled up in his cool sheets together and gone straight to sleep. Now it’s early, barely four thirty, and Ronan had nudged him gently awake to kiss down his chest, shoving his nightshirt up irritably to get at the warm skin beneath, and down again, further, to take him in his mouth. Adam had gasped and sworn and shook and dug his nails into Ronan’s shoulder, which made Ronan gasp in turn, and shove his hand down between his own legs while Adam came in his mouth.

Now Adam feels clearer, somehow – which makes no sense – and certain enough to broach the question that’s been eating at him since he returned a week ago.

“No,” Ronan grumbles, “Some prick didn’t tell me he was coming.” He has his face pressed into Adam’s shoulder, one arm and a leg slung over his body, as though Adam is preparing an escape attempt and he is ready to resist. Truthfully, this is not unfair. He will have to go back to his room before the maid comes to light the fire. “And news travels slower on the farm. It was two days before I heard.” Ronan rarely likes to be still. Even now his fingers trail vague, constant patterns over Adam’s skin: counting ribs, beating time, tracing lines between his freckles. It’s not as absent-minded as it feels, though. Adam can tell. “Why didn’t _you_ send word to _me_? I didn’t even know you were on your way.”

“I couldn’t send word,” Adam says simply, “I ran out of money.”

Ronan props himself up on his elbow to stare at him. Adam misses his weight.

“ _What_? How the fuck did _you_ run out of _money_? You never spend anything. I gave you an _advance_. You’re so fucking careful with your accounts I should have you do the books for the estate.”

Adam shrugs and turns his face to the window, watching the sky lighten outside.

“Family things,” he says, “It’s complicated.” Ronan’s face darkens, Adam can see it from the corner of his eye.

Ronan is a lot of things: impulsive, dangerous, rude, etc. He isn’t stupid and he can read, in the way of people who have cracked ribs or broken noses more than once, the violent map that is Adam’s body. He knows that Adam is deaf in one ear, from early encounters: Ronan coming upon him unawares, and drawing his own conclusions from Adam’s wide-eyed start. And since Ronan knows how scars fade, and that Adam is not partial to his own preferred and frequently violent forms of entertainment, it’s obvious that these landmarks occurred long ago and without Adam’s consent. He hadn’t pressed when Adam had told him he was visiting his mother. He won’t press now. But he fumes, silently, and that is hard to bear in its own way.

Perhaps Adam shouldn’t have told him, but now more than ever some part of him rebels against keeping secrets from Ronan Lynch. He thinks it’s because he knows Ronan wouldn’t keep them from him, and that kind of trust demands repayment to keep them on equal footing.

“It’s over, now,” he offers instead, “I won’t go back.”

“Damn right you won’t,” Ronan grumbles, in a way that Adam knows means: _I wouldn’t stop you, but I’d be fucking incensed_. He settles back down so that even more of his body is draped over Adam’s, and Adam twines an arm around his neck, holding him near. Outside, it’s getting lighter and lighter. He really, really should go. Ronan mumbles something into his shoulder, so low he could pretend not to hear it if he wanted to, “Why didn’t you send a message once you were home?”

“I thought…maybe you were angry with me. For staying away so long. And then I heard about the wedding, and…”

“I _was_ angry with you,” Ronan mutters vehemently into his chest, “Fucking _four weeks_ you said. _At the outside_. But I still wanted to see you,” he curls his long limbs around Adam again, hugging him close. It’s a strange, vulnerable thing to have someone else’s naked body curled that tightly around your naked body, just a membrane’s width away from being one. “I fucking missed you like a lung, Parrish. It was awful.”

Adam laughs, feeling light very suddenly, as though all the weight of the past month and a half has left him in a rush.

“I couldn’t fall asleep,” Adam admits, “At the end of the day, when everything had stopped, I would lie there simply…wanting you. It kept me awake.”

“Next time, I go with you,” Ronan decides, “You’re a shitty letter writer, Parrish – no,” he fumbles a hand over Adam’s mouth; Adam licks it in retaliation, which, honestly, does nothing to discourage him, “Don’t argue – and you gave away all your money. Clearly you can’t be trusted to travel alone.”

“Alright,” Adam laughs against his fingers, “Alright. You can come, too.”

Some day, well into the future, Adam will reflect that he really ought just to keep his promises.

[1] Another way to say this might be: _Forsan et hael olim meminisse iuvabit_ , which, from Fagles’ translation of Virgil’s _The Aeneid_ , Book 1, means: “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be honest, I hate this chapter of _Jane Eyre_. SPOILER ALLERT for those who haven't read the book, but Rochester is such a manipulative asshole. This is an important moment, though, because it really _confirms_ that he's a manipulative asshole. From this point on, in the book, you know to be very suspicious.
> 
> And this chapter is, I suppose, important in the opposite way: Adam assumes the worst, but it turns out Ronan is more steadfast than he'd imagined, already one step ahead, only waiting for him to catch up.
> 
> Still, I feel ambivalent about it, and can't tell whether it's because of how I feel about the source material, or whether I've just read this fic too many times. Hopefully it feels fresh enough to you, my lovely readers!
> 
> ~  
> Next chapter: life is _good_.
> 
> And I have finally, _finally_ caught up on comments. Thank you for your patience, and how lovely it is to have comments to catch up _on_. Really, the comments make all this fiddling around with formatting and such absolutely worthwhile <3


	15. He is not to them what he is to me.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Exposure and bliss, the complexities of the mundane.
> 
> _“Still fighting about geology?”  
>  “I think she’d like it much better if I'd only let her eat the rocks,” Adam admits.  
> “Try bribery. That always worked on me.”  
> _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: if smut is not your thing, skip the library scene. It begins "Adam would have known, if he had been paying attention, that Ronan had come to the library with wayward intentions," and things are PG-ish again from "And so, gradually"

That Ronan is pleased to have him back is obvious. They haven’t spoken much – spring farming duties bow to no man’s pleasure, and Ronan is often away from the house even at night – but he had kissed Adam just that morning. Ronan caught him in an alcove by the back stairs and stole the breath from his body before ducking away again before a servant could catch them, grinning like a fiend.

Adam holds these moments close, trying not to smile too often or obviously. Opal has taken to giving him suspicious looks, rounding on him suddenly to try to catch him in the act, or shoving her little face in close to his so she can look deep in his eyes. Eyes, she tells him seriously one afternoon, are where you keep your secrets, and she knows well that he has one. Adam gets down an anatomy text and attempts a cunning and slightly gruesome distraction.

But, though he thinks at times Opal is a little hurt that he refuses to share it, she forgives him his diversionary tactics because the mystery is so obviously a happy one.

It can’t last, of course. _They_ can last – some days Adam feels that he and Ronan could last through anything – but in great houses like The Barnes, everybody living together for years on end, tucked into one another’s pockets…no secret is indefinitely safe.

And so of course it is Opal who finds them, which is both complicated and right. Adam knows they’ve not been particularly cautious around her. When it is only the three of them, out in the fields or the maze, or tucked under the willows by the ornamental lake, it is hard to imagine there’s any danger in being exactly as they are: a dream, a dreamer and his lover. And it’s exhilarating, intoxicating to touch Ronan out of doors. Adam had never realised of how many small touches a relationship is comprised, until he began to catalogue them, noticing their dips and peaks. When it’s only the three of them, Ronan touches him often, as though trying to make up for the rest.

And so Opal grumbles, gritty-eyed, into the schoolroom one morning to find Adam perched on the table’s edge, Ronan tucked close into the V of his thighs. She glares at them balefully for a moment, then stumps over to the window seat, throws herself onto the cushion, and shoves her nose pointedly into an anthology of Plautus’ comedies. Adam, frozen where he sits, his inner knees still flush against Ronan’s narrow hips, stares at the back of her head for a moment, then transfers his wide eyes to her guardian. Ronan frowns, shrugs, and then slides his palms quick and hard up Adam’s thighs and darts a kiss beneath his jaw, before – much to Adam’s irritation – slipping from the room.

Adam approaches his pupil warily, asks whether she slept well. Opal peers at him over the edge of her book, dark brows drawn menacingly low, and then gives him to understand that the schoolroom is _their_ place, and Ronan is not to intrude unless he has something to share with _both_ of them. Adam, who has grown accustomed to Opal’s general air of ageless otherworldliness, is caught off-guard by this abrupt display of childish jealousy, and struggles to suppress any outward sign of being endeared by it. He promises her at once that his affection for Ronan could never eclipse or disrupt their friendship, that she is in no danger of losing either of them to each other.

Cautiously, he feels around the edges of the more dangerous problem; but Opal seems entirely unconcerned that both Ronan and Adam are undeniably men. Adam releases a breath he’d not been conscious of holding. Opal is, after all, a part of Ronan, in her way. Her responses reveal aspects of Ronan’s inner landscape that he sometimes seems unaware of, if not wilfully blind to. Adam would be lying to himself if he said he had not been afraid to find some trace of discomfort or disgust.

As it is, he need not have worried. By his own measure, Opal has most assuredly seen worse things in Ronan’s mind than her father-figure and tutor being helplessly in love.

They’re more careful after Opal catches them.

Nights are hardest. ‘Sensible’ would be sleeping in separate rooms and only meeting in the brief, isolated hours of midnight to kiss and touch and murmur filth into one another’s mouths; but they cannot be sensible, not entirely, and Adam is discovering by praxis that sex is only one mark on the spectrum of physical delights available. A hand on the nape of your neck, for example, or splayed on your belly or hip. The specific pleasure of waking beneath the recognisable weight of particular arm. Getting tired together, falling asleep together, bowing their heads together over a shared book in the lamplit warmth of Ronan’s bedroom. Trading air, and clothing. There are a thousand small motions and touches and rotations that seem to him now indispensable, non-optional, impossible to give up.

So they try to be careful. But also, they want to live.

Adam would have known, if he had been paying attention, that Ronan had come to the library with wayward intentions. As it is, though he evidently hears the soft _shush_ of the door sweeping open and then the quiet _snick_ of the latch, he glances up only long enough to ascertain that it is Ronan, and not some hopeful book thief, who has invaded his precious morning off.

“You know,” Ronan says conversationally, “I give you this time so you can spend it on leisure, not work.”

Adam smiles over his notes, “Really? I thought you gave me this time so you could harangue me in peace, without Opal glaring at you.”

Ronan scowls good-naturedly, “She gets more time with you than I do.”

“Yes,” Adam agrees; he still hasn’t looked up properly from his book, “But she doesn’t enjoy all of it.”

“Still fighting about geology?”

“I think she’d like it much better if I'd only let her eat the rocks,” Adam admits.

“Try bribery. That always worked on me.”

“Oh, really? And what carrot would one use to lure Ronan Lynch into good behaviour?”

“Riding practice. Baby goats. Attractive farm hands.”

Adam lowers his face more studiously over his papers, and scratches something deliberately into his page, “Hmm.”

Ronan sidles up behind his chair and wraps his arms around Adam’s shoulders, nosing into the soft hair on his hearing side, “That last was meant in jest.”

“I caught it.”

“You could bribe me with you,” Ronan suggests, “I’d likely do anything you want for it.”

Adam huffs a laugh that is half disbelieving, but half something softer and much more vulnerable, “You really oughtn’t to tell people that.”

“You aren’t people, and there’s no purpose in hiding it from you,” Ronan points out. Adam has shed his jacket and is wearing just his shirt and waistcoat, the collar done up high beneath his jaw. Ronan trails a thoughtful hand over his necktie, his shirtfront, lingers over his waistcoat buttons, “You know already that it’s true.”

“Ronan,” Adam says warningly, laying his hand over Ronan’s restless fingers to still them, “What are you up to?”

“Making sure my lover doesn’t work himself into an early grave,” Ronan grumbles into his neck, “Are you not clever enough yet?” Adam smiles, warm and lazy and indulgent.

“It isn’t enough to be clever alone, one must _know_ things, too. Knowledge is how cleverness becomes useful. And I don’t know nearly enough.”

“Sometimes I really think you only like me for my library.”

“Well,” Adam tells him seriously, “That was a contributing factor, to be sure.” Ronan pinches his arm and Adam yelps and then laughs at him. “Arsehole,” he says. It sounds fond. Ronan’s heart squeezes itself against his ribs. He sets his nose into Adam’s neck and breathes deeply, feeling tension ebb from his shoulders and back as he surrounds himself with the familiar scent of _Adam_ : old papers, cut grass, sunshine, the faintest hint of something citrus in his cologne. Adam leans back against him with a contented hum, but he still hasn’t relinquished his damn book.

Fine, then. Ronan can work with that.

He draws Adam’s hand, and the hand it caught, up until he can wrap his arm more securely around Adam’s shoulders, keeping him in his chair. Adam squeezes his fingers absently, but he hasn’t noticed anything amiss yet, only settles himself back into Ronan’s embrace and turns a page. Ronan skims his free hand lightly down, over shirt and waistcoat, coming to rest against Adam’s thigh. Adam shifts slightly, when he squeezes, but doesn’t comment. Slowly, Ronan drags his palm up, pressing more firmly, running his thumb over the inseam of Adam’s trousers.

“Ronan?” Adam asks, finally. He tries to crane around to see Ronan’s face, but Ronan is having none of it. He nips Adam’s ear, quick and sharp, then kisses it thoroughly and repentantly when Adam swears and cranes away from him instead.

“God, you’re irritating sometimes,” Adam grumbles, “Isn’t there someone else you could be bothering? A horse you could fall off, perhaps? Opal found a dead bird yesterday – I’m sure she’d appreciate an assistant for her dissection.”

If Ronan were a less attentive man, he might buy this blatant diversionary tactic. But he _is_ attentive, and he is tuned to Adam’s body in ways he’s never been to another human being. So, as Adam speaks, Ronan is conscious of how the other man’s shoulders have grown incrementally softer against him. When Ronan sweeps his thumb delicately over the place where his trousers stretch, taught, across his lap, he feels Adam’s tremble as if it is his own body.

Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to _know_ that he is wanted. The thought of being truly unwanted by Adam, at any time, over any thing, has become a neat item on Ronan’s list of regular self-flagellators. He has no wish to give the self-loathing fantasy real-life fodder.

“I’ll go,” he murmurs against Adam’s neck, “You’re right. I shouldn’t interrupt your work.” He brushes his thumb one last time against the thin wool and moves to withdraw his hand.

Adam catches it. He fits his palm to Ronan’s knuckles and threads their long fingers together, applying pressure enough to press Ronan’s palm more firmly against his thigh.

“You really shouldn’t,” Adam agrees. Ronan hums acquiescence into his collar, feels the slow, controlled rise and fall of Adam’s shoulders. He flexes his fingers against Adam’s thigh and the rhythm syncopates. “I’ve lost my place” Adam tells him, exerting pressure on Ronan’s hand, dragging it slowly upward, “You’ll set me back a whole paragraph.”

Ronan allows Adam to guide his hand up into the V of Adam’s trousers. He presses down gently with the heel of his palm, and though Adam’s breath barely hitches, Ronan feels him subtly shift his thighs further apart; _there_ , the first thrill of victory.

“You should keep going,” Ronan says conversationally; then, in a bald and shocking lie (so obvious that he forgives himself), “I hate to disrupt your schedule.”

Adam snorts, and almost certainly rolls his eyes, and then shifts subtly in his chair, sinking lower. The angle presses his groin up, ever so slightly, against their joined hands.

“Your work,” Ronan repeats firmly. He steadies the arm around Adam’s shoulders while his other hand shifts back, keeping the pressure tantalisingly light. Adam’s fingers tighten between his insistently, but Ronan will not be nudged. “I know you don’t want to lose any time. You should get on with it.”

Adam’s voice is incredulous, and gratifyingly rough at the edges, “What.”

“Your passage. If you want to finish it by lunch,” delicately, Ronan rocks his palm, applying just a fraction more pressure, “You should get back to it.”

“You wish me to return to my work,” Adam says flatly.

“Of course,” Ronan tells him, “I don’t want to fuck up your plans.”

“Really,” Adam says.

“Really,” Ronan tells him. Then, “I know, you ought to read it aloud.”

“What?”

“Out loud. Read the Latin, first. Then the translation,” Ronan presses again, flicks his thumb gently over the hardening bulge in Adam’s trousers, “Translations are always so much better tested aloud. One has to get a feel for how the language is supposed to flow.”

“You want me to read Ovid out loud. To you. _Now_.”

“Well,” Ronan grins against his ear. He flicks his tongue against the shell, and Adam’s sharp inhale fills him with a deep satisfaction, “Catullus would be better. But I’ll take what you have.”

Adam holds perfectly still for a moment. If he tells Ronan to fuck off, he will, of course. But he’s hoping, quite desperately as it turns out, that Adam won’t.

And he doesn’t. He untangles their fingers and lifts his book once more.

“ _Labitur occulte fallitque volatilis aetas **[1]**_ ,” Adam begins.

“Perfect,” Ronan murmurs. He fits his fingers around Adam’s length as best he can through the taught fabric of his trousers, begins with slow, even strokes.

Adam – and this ought to surprise no-one – is good at this game. His breath is slowly, steadily quickening, but he doesn’t stutter or miss a consonant. Ronan keeps at his task, focussed and rhythmic and infuriatingly slow, but Adam doesn’t falter until his erection is straining painfully against his trousers and he pauses, biting his lip, and opens his mouth to speak –

“Is that the end of the passage?” Ronan asks.

“No,” Adam bites out.

“Why stop, then?” Adam grits his teeth. Ronan keeps stroking him, painfully languid, through his pants.

“If you make me come in my sodding trousers –”

“Is there something else you’d prefer?”

“ _Ronan_ ,” Adam says.

“Tell me what you want,” Ronan whispers fiercely, “And I’ll do it. Anything you want me to do.”

Adam turns his head until their noses brush, and Ronan can see that his eyes are half-lidded, pupils wide and dark. “Kiss me,” Adam breathes, “And then _bloody well touch me_ , you bastard.”

Ronan laughs into his mouth and kisses him, breathlessly, defencelessly, because he’s hopeless and can’t resist; Adam makes a helpless noise against him that undoes any resolve he might’ve had left.

He makes short work of Adam’s flies, and then pauses. Adam is panting into his mouth, now.

“Well?” Ronan whispers.

“What?” Adam sounds a little dazed.

“Keep at it.” Adam just blinks at him, “The book. I like this part.”

“Fuck,” Adam says, swallowing thickly, “I didn’t – I thought.”

“Anyone could knock on that door, you know,” Ronan whispers, and feels Adam shudder beneath him, “But if they hear you reading, they’ll go away.”

“Y – Yes.” He seems to drag himself from the kiss by brute force, picking up his volume again and fumbling a moment for the page. Ronan gives his cock an encouraging squeeze, and Adam’s entire body twitches.

“Yes,” he manages, and there’s no way to tell whether he’s still agreeing with Ronan or saying something else entirely, “Yes. Alright… _abstinet et caelo: caelo praefertur Adonis. Hunc tenet, huic comes est adsuetaque semper in umbra -_ _”_

Ronan strokes him slowly, steadily, not quite hard enough. He wants to drag this out, make it exquisite and overwhelming. He wants Adam to remember this every time he reads this passage in the future, wants the feel of Ronan’s fingers eternally seared into these words. He wants him to forget every word in his vocabulary.

Ronan is so absorbed in this task that he barely registers the shift in lexicon. Adam is translating: breathlessly, on stutters and half-gasps, accent slipping in at the edges.

“- he asks her why, she says: ‘I will tell, and you will wonder –‘ ”

“ _Fuck_ , Adam,” Ronan’s hand stutters as a shudder runs right through him.

“ ‘- and, look, a poplar tree entices us with its welcome shade, and the turf yields a bed –‘ ”

Who’d have believed that spontaneous translation would rile him so? But it isn’t the words, not really, it’s hearing Adam’s brain still whirring as his body falls to pieces beneath Ronan’s hand, Adam clinging to the last of his lucidity, clutching Ronan’s fingers at his shoulder like a lifeline.

“ ‘- I should like to rest here on the ground,’ (and she rested) ‘with you.’ She hugged the grass, and him, and leaning her head against the breast of the reclining youth –”

Ronan cannot take one word more in silence, “Jesus, Parrish, your mind is a fucking marvel. You’re so _bloody_ brilliant, you ought to be at Oxford, or Edinborough, _somewhere_. Christ. What the hell are you about, wasting your time out here in the middle of nowhere? Why’d you ever pick up with a bastard like –”

The book tumbles to the table as Adam grabs blindly for the back of Ronan’s neck, pulling him down until they meet in a messy, searing kiss. Adam’s hips are pushing up, now, roughly, into Ronan’s fist, all pretence of calm abandoned, and Ronan tightens his grip thoughtlessly, hard-wired by now to give Adam what he wants. “Shut up,” Adam pants into his mouth, “God, _shut up_ , you’re beautiful, you’re incredible – _fuck_ I’m going to – God, you’re – ”

He comes all over Ronan’s hand, shaking and panting like he’s run for miles, sweat plastering the hair to his nape. Ronan, who has had occasion to do this sort of thing before, has the presence of mind to catch the worst of it in his handkerchief; then he feels his neck flush, embarrassed to be so worldly. He senses Adam watching him, words finally spent, dissolved beneath a roiling tide of pure, physical feeling, and looks up almost hesitantly to meet his eyes. But Adam, who is stroking a hand through the warm fuzz of Ronan’s hair while he catches his breath, only smiles in a way that makes Ronan feel at once wondering and gratified and known.

Ronan feels a heady rush of affection for him; Ronan, obviously, prefers a mess, would be best pleased if Adam were to walk around undone and smelling of sex at every hour of the day. But he knows what Adam likes, too, wants him to have it all. Adam, in his turn, only watches, dark eyed and still, as Ronan sucks his own fingers clean, making no attempt to hide it when his eyelids flutter at the taste of Adam on his skin. He squeezes Adam’s shoulder, turns his chair so Ronan can kneel between his thighs and clean Adam, too, gently, with his tongue. Adam shudders delicately and closes his hand around the back of Ronan’s neck, and Ronan’s breath stutters. He cleans Adam up and tucks him neatly back away, slips the soiled handkerchief in his own pocket and looks up to find Adam’s eyes still on him, unwavering, intent. Ronan grins, and reaches up to run a hand through the disaster of Adam’s hair.

“I barely fucking touched you, Parrish,” he says, “How are you such a fucking catastrophe?”

It takes Adam a moment to recover enough to realise what he’s talking about.

“God, Ronan,” he hisses, “Doing up my trousers won’t fix my goddamn hair. I’m a bloody mess! I’ll never be able to leave this library again!”

“Then don’t,” Ronan offers practically, “You can stay here and I’ll bring you food, and wine; we’ll make up a bed in the corner. Opal won’t mind taking her lessons in here. We can move the frogs in underneath the window.”

Adam laughs, and Ronan feels warmed by it, buries his face in the crook of Adam’s knee and just breathes in.

“I think that would rather give away our secret, don’t you? _Carmen et error **[2]**_ ,”

“ ‘ _Error_ ’ my ass. That was fantastic.”

Adam rolls his head to one side, resting his temple on the chair back and gazing down at Ronan. He still looks dazed, calamitous, beautifully irritable and amused at the same time. He flicks his eyes over Ronan’s face then down, reaching as best he can without moving, the lazy fucker, to trail a languid hand over Ronan’s shoulder and chest.

“Did you even…?”

“No,” he hides his face more firmly against Adam’s knee, “We need a little more privacy for what I want.”

“Oh, so you _do_ want me to leave the library.”

“Eventually. Late is fine. Midnight is perfect.”

“The witching hour. How appropriate.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Ronan tells him. _In perpetua **[3]**_ , probably. Adam is so very worth waiting for.

And so, gradually, their shared life becomes…normal. Ordinary, in that most wonderful and expansive way that love, real love, can be. A mutual spring-time of growth and light and abundance. Adam continues his classes with Opal; Ronan spends his hours on the farm, roll-sleeved, broad straw hat barely keeping the pink from his fair skin. They bicker, snipe, trade books and best-loved passages and difficult phrases of Latin and Greek, and kisses in empty corridors, linen closets, walled gardens, drawing-rooms, bedrooms. Nights they spend together, touching, talking, reading, sleeping, fucking, loving, wandering, exploring. Bodies twined around and within one another, infinite-seeming permutations of closeness, of intimacy, which Adam had never imagined himself capable of, and Ronan had long-since despaired of finding.

Yes, they must watch their hands and eyes in public. Yes, there are restrictions. But at The Barnes, this world away from the world, where Ronan is king, they are less noticeable than they might be elsewhere. They are safe as can be; better, they are very nearly free. And they are together.

[1] From Ovid’s _Metamorphosis_ , book X, 503-559: _Orpheus sings: Venus and Adonis_. The translation is by Anthony S. Kline, and can be found (along with the Latin version) here: <https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Ovhome.htm#askline> Once again, my I do not speak Latin, so I had to guess at the phrases Adam speaks.

[2] When Ovid was banished in AD8 for writing a how-to book on love, he described his wrongdoing as _carmen et error_ – a poem and a mistake.

[3] Always, forever

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made some last-minute changes to this and haven't time to go back over it as I normally would; please forgive any oddities, I'll probably re-read and fix at some point.
> 
> Also, the library scene should not be confused with some kind of sexy librarian fantasy; did you know that the prevelance of that trope in mainstream porn apparently contributes to a really fucked-up culture of sexual assault in libraries? I cannot stress enough how angry this makes me, because I love libraries, and while they may be happily involved in sexy scenarios at times, context is very important. Seriously, why do people ruin everything?/Failure to understand and respect consent is really the root of all evil in the world.
> 
> ~  
> Next chapter: the various complexities of sleeping with a dreamer.


	16. The germs of love.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hazardous dreaming, ongoing negotiations, a pivotal theory.
> 
> _The smell of damp wood and charred feathers permeates the room.  
>  “Ow,” Ronan grumbles beneath him. Adam stares down at him with wide eyes.  
> “How did you survive this long sleeping alone?” Adam demands. He thinks – worries – about this question often. _

One morning Adam wakes because he is wet. Not a little wet, but wet right through. Soaking. And _cold_ , because the autumn nights are getting longer and it’s too early for the maid to have lit the fire in his room.

Thank god.

The bed is swimming with water, a puddle forming in the indent by his hip. When he looks up he realises that the reason for this is not a sudden cave-in or a meteorite, or even a window left carelessly open, but a rain cloud. Tucked in beneath the canopy of his bead like cotton wool is a roiling mass of storm clouds. They give no indication of letting up any time soon.

Ronan is still sprawled beside him on his stomach, arms crossed under his pillow and one leg tucked beneath Adam’s. When Adam turns to look at him he sees that Ronan is already looking back, pale eyes clear but unblinking.

 _Paralysed_ , Adam thinks. He’s familiar, now, with the pattern, though it unnerves him still, to wake to Ronan’s limp body at his side.

And then he sees a flicker of light above him and shoves Ronan bodily off the bed just in time to avoid a small but determined lighting strike. The smell of damp wood and charred feathers permeates the room. Ronan’s pillow smoulders.

“Ow,” Ronan grumbles beneath him. Adam stares down at him with wide eyes.

“How did you survive this long sleeping alone?” Adam demands. He thinks – worries – about this question often.

Ronan rubs at the bump on the back of his skull and squints up at him sleepily. Attractively. He’s very naked except for his legs, which are still tangled in the wet bedsheet, and Adam is also very naked, and it’s quite distracting to be lying here on top of him on the floor. Water starts to drip off the side of the bed and onto Adam’s thigh. He rolls off Ronan and stares up at the ceiling.

“What do we do with it?” he asks, trying to keep his mind on the issue at hand.

Ronan shrugs. Adam feels it where their shoulders are pressed together. “Shove it out the window where storm clouds belong.”

“How do we explain the damage?”

“Bath accident? Smoking in bed?”

“Won’t someone who knows put two and two together and realise that you were sleeping in my room?”

Ronan sighs, rubbing his hands hard over his face, “Maybe. Fuck, Parrish, I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

Adam is instantly sorrier. He reaches over to run the backs of his knuckles over Ronan’s chest, his belly, up again, soothing and rhythmic. “Don’t, it’s nothing. As you say. We’ll just push it out the window.” Ronan grunts. “Lucky there are all those spare bedrooms on this floor.”

Cold, wet fingers close gently about his wrist, and Ronan brings his hand up to press a kiss against his knuckles. His mouth is searingly warm, and Adam’s shiver is almost an automatic response, now, at the thought of Ronan touching his hands.

He takes a deep breath, trying to focus. “Fuck,” he says, “If the bed spills over any more it’s going to leak through the floor.” Ronan delicately bites the tip of his finger. “Ronan!” Adam pushes himself up on his other hand and tries to glare determinedly, “Stop that. Raincloud _then_ fucking. Alright?”

Ronan, menace that he is, grins at him around his finger, sucking it briefly into his mouth and then releasing it with a sharp – wet, _obscene_ – pop. Adam shudders. Ronan rolls smoothly to his feet, leaving the sheet tangled on the floor, and climbs, stark naked, back onto the bed. He pokes at the edge of the cloud.

“Alright,” he says, “If you go around the other side, I think we should be able to coax it out. Open the window first, would you? And don’t bloody let it float away, whatever you do – if it hits the ceiling we’ll have to go for a ladder.”

Adam sighs, bemused as ever by the pragmatism with which Ronan greets the bizarre occurrences that frequent his life. He rubs his hands though his hair, then stands to grab his dressing gown and do as directed. When he had occasionally, in what now seems like a past life, imagined connubial bliss, this is not exactly how he’d pictured it; he has to admit this is much more interesting.

Adam barges into Ronan’s study without knocking and slams the door behind him. Pictures rattle on the wall.

“Tell me what the hell this is,” he snaps, thrusting the clothes hanger towards Ronan. He can’t quite bring himself to risk the beautiful fabric in the mess of papers and ink bottles that is Ronan’s desk, but his scowl conveys the seriousness of his displeasure quite adequately.

Ronan looks up from his ledger with eyebrows raised, then lowers them to somewhere between ‘confusion’ and ‘suspicion’ when he sees what is in Adam’s hand.

“Did you hit your head, Parrish? Surely you recognise good English tweed when it’s set before you.”

Adam grinds his teeth together; Ronan, infuriating creature that he is, leans back in his chair and contemplates him with every appearance of ease.

“I noticed that the elbows of your brown suit were looking thin. Do you not like the colour?” the slightest flush pinks Ronan’s cheeks, as he adds, a little belligerently, “I thought it would suit you, but I’ll have it done again in something else, if you like.”

“The _colour_ is not the issue, _Mr Lynch_ ,” Adam growls, shaking the offending article dangerously, meaningfully, in the air between them, “The _issue_ is that you _had a suit made for me_.”

Ronan’s shrug perfectly feigns the bored arrogance of the wealthy, wastrel gentleman he is supposed to be – exactly the sort of man who would squander vast sums on outfitting a mistress in the latest fashions from London or Paris – and Adam only grinds his teeth more firmly.

“I can’t have you wandering around in rags, now, can I, Parrish? What would the neighbours say?”

Heat floods Adam’s face in a rush, and his hand, white-knuckled on the clothes hanger, begins to shake. “I was not _wandering around in **rags**_!” he snarls, “My clothes are _perfectly sodding respectable_ and _you know it_!”

At long last, Ronan is beginning to catch up to the situation and to look, at least, a little alarmed, “Sweet Christ, Adam, it’s only a suit. One would think I tried to steal your wages.”

“No,” Adam says coldly, “You only attempted to dress me like a bloody doll, as though I am not perfectly aware that you spend as much on one season’s dresses for Opal as I might earn in three years. If you are ashamed of me, kindly tell me so to my face. Fine clothing will not mask my plebian origins.”

“Ashamed –“ Ronan pushes up out of his chair and leans over the desk between them, heedless of papers crushing beneath his palms, and says fiercely, “I’m not bloody _ashamed_ of you, Adam, how could you think – good God, man, _I_ don’t give a fuck what you wear! Parade around in flour-sacks and straw sandals, for all I care, your legs could use a bit of sun. Easier access, and all that,” he doesn’t even leer; his face is quiet and intense in its sincerity, when he says, “ _I_ don’t care a whit what other people think, Adam, but _you_ do. I saw you were in need of a new suit and I thought…my _only_ thought was that it must be a discomfort to you, to be anything less than well attired. I never intended to overstep my bounds. You bloody well know I don’t want you any way but as you are.”

Adam glares at him, trying to keep his anger wrapped tight around the confusion blooming beneath his breastbone, and Ronan holds his gaze and only shrugs again. This time it’s real: a little tired, a little helpless. Adam softens despite himself.

“You can’t simply –” he waves the suit again between them, feeling a little lame, all of a sudden, to be complaining about beautiful gifts from a man he loves; but, no. _Expensive_ beautiful gifts, from a very _wealthy_ man, who is _also his employer_ , “Ronan,” he tries again, more firmly, “You mustn’t give me things like this. It’s too much. I could never afford it myself.”

“No,” Ronan says quite slowly, as though to a particularly recalcitrant child, “And nor could you have when my bookseller extracted a minor prince’s ransom for that leather-bound copy of Herodotus which you like so much,” Adam winces, but he can’t deny that he had suspected this truth, and tried to ignore it. “Perhaps you’ve not noticed,” Ronan continues, in a gentler tone, “But I’ve money enough to buy beautiful things for the both of us, and Opal besides,” he lifts one hand to reach out across the desk, just enough to touch the back of Adam’s knuckles, still clenched around the clothes hanger, “I want to do it.”

The fight is gone from Adam, and though it will return on many occasions to come, no doubt, Ronan’s heart is well-placed and impossible to argue with in this way.

“I know that,” he says, quietly, “I know that you do. And books, music – items for pleasure, things we can share, that Opal will enjoy, besides – that, I can allow. But this,” he lifts the suit slightly, where it hangs limp, now, at his side. The beautiful, silken brown threads glow in the low afternoon sun from the window at Ronan’s back, “You must let me handle my own needs, as I see fit. I must be in charge of my own affairs.” He senses Ronan’s rebuttal coming before the scowl can gather between his brows, and adds, his trump card, “Ronan. Do you not see how strange it would seem, that you should employ your own tailor to dress your daughter’s tutor? People will notice that I am living impossibly beyond my means, and become suspicious. Not of you, but of me. They will believe I am taking advantage of you, Ronan. That I have some hold over you, which I am abusing for my own gain.”

A small, sad smile twists Ronan’s lip. He glances down at the papers on his desk, idly tracing a column of figures with the tip of one finger.

“You do have a hold over me,” he says softly.

“I should hope so,” Adam tells him, equally quiet, “That seems only fair.”

Ronan glances up at him through his long black lashes, “Did you even try it on?”

“What?”

“The suit, idiot. Did you try it on before you stormed in here to berate me?”

“Of course not.” Adam glowers; that tiny smile tugs a little wider at Ronan’s mouth. His pale eyes take on a considering air, sharpening beneath the dark fringe of his lashes.

“Shame. It’s not like you to squander good things, Parrish.”

Adam glares at him a little more pointedly as the grin spreads across Ronan’s face. His treacherous thumb traces over the collar, feeling the fine grain of the tweed, the crisp curve of a well-crafted lapel. Ronan has a point. He does hate wastefulness. He glances over at the unlocked door, feels Ronan’s gaze heat as he traces the gesture.

“How did you get my measurements in the first place?”

Ronan’s shark grin gleams, toothfully irresistible.

“You sleep very deeply when well-fucked, you know.”

“Do I, indeed,” Adam drawls. He drapes the suit over the back of a chair and turns towards the door, starting on the buttons of his waistcoat. “No more, then?” it does well to check these things, where Ronan is concerned.

“Never again will I buy you anything you actually need, Parrish. Swear to my God. Swear on your life.”

“That’s a little excessive,” Adam tells him. Ronan is predictably unrepentant.

“Why don’t you simply dream them?” he asks, later, fingering the jacket’s sleeve, “I might not mind so much, if I knew the things you gave me came from here,” he brushes the rough stubble of Ronan’s scalp with his lips, “Rather than London or the Continent.”

Ronan shrugs bonelessly, irritation creasing the skin between his brows. Adam gentles it away with his thumb.

“I often try, first,” Ronan admits, sounding reluctant, “But not everything comes out as I might wish. Very specific things can be…complicated.”

“Complicated how?” Adam asks. Ronan cranes around to peer up at him, head pillowed on the crook of Adam’s elbow. The frown remains, despite Adam’s best efforts, and Ronan is giving him a slightly detached, weighing sort of look.

“Mrs Sargent said she found you, once, poking your head into one of the upstairs rooms in the westernmost wing.”

“Yes,” Adam says, “But she seemed so flustered that I didn’t like to ask her about it.”

“Well, you understand now, of course. That’s where we keep the dream things, the ones that don’t work.”

“There are things up there that you dreamed for me?” Adam asks, surprised.

“Only the ones that didn’t turn out.”

“Can I see? Will you show me?”

Ronan gazes at him steadily, pale eyes unreadable as a frozen lake; Adam lets him look. He’s almost used to it by now.

“Alright,” Ronan says abruptly, and folds himself upwards to sit, then unfolds again to stand. He reaches down to draw Adam up off the rug, “But some of it is dangerous, and most of it is very bizarre. Don’t say you weren’t warned. And,” he adds, as an afterthought, pausing in the doorway, “Don’t touch anything, will you. I like you with all your fingers attached.”

Adam, taking this warning to heart, tucks his hands firmly into his trouser pockets. The beautiful wool of his new suit is smooth against his knuckles.

On the third floor of the westernmost wing, a cascade of shuttered rooms runs down the right-hand side of a long gallery, flooded with late sun and overlooking the forest. Ronan wades carelessly into a lumpen sea of dust and dun-coloured sheeting, twitching back a corner here, prizing a box open there and sniffing suspiciously at its contents. Adam follows him a few paces back, wary of disturbing this strange landscape of cloth valleys and peaks, alien objects peeking out from the edges. There’s a line from something running though his head, Shakespeare, perhaps. _Misshapen chaos_ …

Each chamber connects to the gallery by one door, and to the next room via a folding pair on the far wall. Ronan leads the way through one set, another. In the third room he swings his head about like a hound, scenting the air, and says, “Oh, here,” and yanks hard on a heavy sheet. It ruffles to the ground, revealing a tall, wobbling bookcase, lacquer flaking with age. Adam steps up beside him and peers into the shadowed recesses of a shelf at piles of poorly folded tweed.

“I tried this first,” Ronan is saying, as he snags one bundle and shakes it out, revealing a suit-jacket that is perfect in every way, except that the lapels are neatly and inexplicably fused to the back lining so that it forms a flat, cohesive fabric instead of a three-dimensional garment. “I was focussing too much on the fabric, I think. I wanted it to be warm and light, and also waterproof. And I suppose it might be, only it’s rather proof against wearing, as well.”

Adam reaches a little tentatively for a second pile, and pulls out a beautifully made brown suit so small it would not fit Opal. A third, though rightly sized, is of a cloth which is unpleasantly smooth, and smells persistently of wet wool. A fourth has shoulders so sharp and narrow they would not fit a doll, and sleeves that reach almost to the floor. Adam examines each one, fascinated, then folds and replaces it on its shelf.

Ronan, meanwhile, has meandered off into the gloom. Adam can hear him rustling about, picking up things and opening drawers.

“Here,” Ronan pops up suddenly over an unidentifiable piece of furniture and tosses something at him. Adam catches it automatically. He turns a silky black top hat in his hands and glances up enquiringly.

“Put it on,” Ronan tells him, “You’ll see.”

Adam sets the hat warily on his skull and finds nothing out of the ordinary about it until he hears a muffled snorting sound and looks up to see Ronan, face contorted, badly smothering a laugh. In the ensuing chase, Ronan tumbles back out into the gallery. Adam corners him – or, perhaps more accurately, once Ronan allows himself to be cornered – between a window and a dusty settee, jamming the hat down over his head, and watches slack-jawed as Ronan’s face transforms. His skin sprouts pale fur, and his nose and chin lengthen, joining to form a soft, whiskered snout, while his eyes grow huge and dark. A pair of long, dove-grey ears sprout from the hat’s crown.

Half-horrified, Adam reaches out to touch the trembling black nose, and is shocked by the weight of his relief when his fingers slide right through and brush Ronan’s familiar top lip.

“Well?” Ronan asks, mouth moving against Adam’s hand, “Ten guineas say I’m make a far more dashing farm animal than you do.”

Adam quashes a smile; it pushes out of him regardless.

“You certainly make a very sweet little grey rabbit,” he tells Ronan seriously. Ronan scowls, then brightens suddenly.

“The jest is mine, after all,” he says, “You’re a rotten old billygoat!” And he takes full advantage of Adam’s moment of astonished affront to sweep the hat off his head and attempt a fresh assault on Adam’s person. Adam squawks in a most undignified fashion and wrestles the hat away, tussling him down onto the couch, and Ronan only laughs up at him, dust blooming in the air about his head, gold-washed by the dying sun.

“I still don’t really understand,” Adam admits one evening. They are sprawled together on the fainting couch in Ronan’s study, door locked, fire burned low. He rests back against Ronan’s chest and feels warm and languid. Usually, this is enough lull him into contentment, but this question still niggles at him sometimes, even after months. He turns his face to press a kiss into Ronan’s neck, and mumbles, “Why do you want this, with me?”

Though his back, he can feel tension and irritation warring in Ronan’s body with the lazy satisfaction of the evening. “What is there to be confused about?”

“I don’t understand _why_.”

“Well _that’s_ the easiest question of all. Every reason. Each single one.”

Adam shakes his head, “It’s too easy.”

Ronan laughs at him, a little meanly, and also as though he’s seriously considering punching him in the face, “You think this has been _easy_?”

“Well not _this_ , specifically. But me. Here. With you. Of all the places in the world.”

There’s a pause, longer than he was expecting, and Adam feels a sudden premonition of… _something_ , tickle down his spine. An ambivalent feeling. Strange. Ronan is biting his lip.

“Well,” he says, finally, “Actually. I think I may have about half a bloody good theory about that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I went back and made this chapter about twice as long, partially because it seemed unbalanced, but mostly because I don't feel I've made the most of the whole dreams-come-true story-telling goldmine which is, to me, the greatest charm of the original books. I love how pragmatic Ronan is about dealing with his dreams, too, and that dynamic just opens up so many avenues for absurd and wonderfully bizarre situations...but I fear this is not the story to maximise on those possibilities.
> 
> Oh, well. More stories to write later, I suppose!
> 
> ~*~
> 
> Next chapter...well. The next chapter's kind of a big one. I don't want to spoil it for you all.
> 
> Thanks as always to my lovely readers, kudos-ers, bookmarkers, subscribers, and commenters. I am so happy that people are reading and enjoying this fic.


	17. I am no bird;

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> History, trees and woe.
> 
> _It’s dark, there beneath the trees, and yet still not as dark as he’d expected. The farther they walk, the lighter it seems to get._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am _so sorry_. 
> 
> I've not, in any way, abandoned this fic or my lovely readers; the internet, on the other hand, has temporarily abandoned me. I'm getting it sorted, but I'm afraid posting may be spotty for a little while :( Thank you to everyone who sent me nice messages hoping I was well - thankfully, I am, just technologically compromised.
> 
> Anyway, to tide you over, and to avoid the risk of leaving you with a cliff-hanger, I'm going to post two chapters today. I'm not sure "hope you'll enjoy them" is the right sentiment (you'll see what I mean), but I hope this helps in case it's a week before I can post again.

So this is how it ends.

Adam always knew it would, deep down at the root of his heart, where all the callouses have been stripped away and he is as vulnerable and raw as a fresh wound. It couldn’t possibly last. It was too good to be permanently, irrevocably real; his time at The Barns has been a type of longing dream, unfit for the knocks of real life, as has been proven to him many, many times.

Ronan leads him into the forest, where he has never before set foot.

The moment Adam realises where their path is heading, he does not want to go. His feet drag of their own accord, his lungs feel heavy. He wants to tell Ronan _stop. Don’t. You’re breaking something_. But he can’t find the breath. He’s not sure it would help anyway, because they’re here, now. It’s happening. Whatever ‘it’ is.

It’s dark, there beneath the trees, and yet still not as dark as he’d expected. In fact, the farther they walk, the lighter it seems to get. Adam thinks he must be imagining it when he feels the first lick of a warm breeze at the back of his neck, but he isn’t. As he follows Ronan through the trees he begins to be able to make out individual roots and branches, the mossy stones beneath his feet, the texture of the bark.

And, of course, it isn’t just _a_ forest; it’s _the_ forest. _His_ forest. Only not his as it was in Henrietta, but rather that other forest, the dream forest, the forest that is his-but-more.

His and Ronan’s forest.

They step out into the clearing with the fast clear rill that splits around the large flat stone, the place where he had met Ronan for the first time in a dream, and Adam finds himself blinking up at a cloudless and fathomless blue sky. The air is so warm that Ronan is shrugging his coat off, rolling his shirtsleeves back, but Adam only stares: at him, at the trees – some deeply familiar and some only newly so – at the water rushing between mossy stones.

“This is impossible,” he says. His voice is rusty.

Ronan shrugs easily. “I know. I’m impossible, you’re impossible, this,” he waves a hand at the whispering branches and the clear, day-bright sky, “Is impossible. And yet.”

Adam sits down, hard, on a boulder.

“You knew all this time?”

“That I was dreaming about a real place? Yes. So did you.”

They’ve never really spoken of it before, their shared dream. It is one of those things so improbable, yet so palpably factual, that it is hardly worth discussing. Surely it is no stranger to share dreams than to be able to extract things from them, or to find the future in a deck of cards?

“Yes,” Adam admits, “But I thought – it’s gone, my forest. I went to see it when I visited Henrietta and there’s nothing there. I don’t mean burnt or cut down, I mean gone as if it never was. A field of weeds, a muddy brook. Nothing. Nobody else even remembers it.”

“Well, that makes a sort of sense, doesn’t it?” Ronan asks reasonably. He waves a hand again at the trees, “I mean, it came here. With you.”

“With me?”

“Yes. I didn’t notice it for a while, I don’t come here often except in dreams, and it hadn’t changed there. Not for me. But Opal noticed it, here, in the real world. She kept telling me that the real forest was different, that it had changed when you arrived.”

“But that’s absurd,” Adam says thickly, “I can’t just… _move a forest_.”

“I think, Parrish, that the only person who seems consistently certain of what you cannot do is _you_ ; and I have to tell you, you are very often wrong.”

Adam glares at him, but it’s the product more of habit than of any real irritation.

“So I…brought my forest. To your forest. To what end?”

For the first time, Ronan looks a little uncomfortable. He scrubs a hand over the back of his neck and glances at Adam furtively from beneath his long lashes, then quickly away.

“Well. The thing is, Parrish, this forest wasn’t always…here.”

“Alright.”

“Did you know I wasn’t born at The Barnes? I didn’t come here until I was three months old. My parents had been living in London, and when my mother’s time grew near they went to stay with friends in the country. An estate called Washington Park.”

Adam feels again that cold, prickling sense of premonition, but he can’t yet put together the pieces to reveal the final view.

“When you sent me that first letter from Henrietta,” Ronan says, “I was surprised to discover that I was already familiar with the area. I’ve visited it many times throughout my life because –”

“Because Washington borders on Henrietta’s grounds,” Adam says slowly. He feels a little ill, but still cannot figure out why.

“Yes.” Ronan says. Then, “You can imagine the groundkeeper’s surprise when, over a period of months, a small forest sprang up in the bordering valley. I believe they tried to cut it down at first, but each night it returned, and sooner or later they gave it up and instead began to avoid the place. It unsettled them, as perhaps it should. Magic _is_ unsettling,” he glances up at Adam again, lingering this time, “For most people.”

When Ronan was born, Adam would still have been a babe not yet out of his swaddling clothes. That they had co-existed in this way, so close and under such extremely different circumstances – Adam, bundled into his mother’s (ill-named) hope-chest at the foot of the bed, while Ronan lay resplendent in an ornate cradle, only miles away – seems both incredible and somehow unsurprising. They echo each other now in so many ways, why shouldn’t it have begun even then?

But Adam is still missing something. The final piece that will put the picture together and bring his terrible presentiment to pass.

“So, the forest…” he begins.

“I dreamed it,” Ronan says in a rush, “It was the first thing I dreamed. All my life I’ve dreamed of this forest. I began dreaming it when I was born, in England, at Washington Park. And then my parents brought me here and I kept dreaming, and dreaming, and the forest grew. I don’t know why part of it stayed in England, and I don’t know why it disappeared when you came here, and reappeared, somehow, at The Barnes, with you; but if I’m honest, I’ve never felt I fully understood it. It’s not like the other dreams, not even Opal or Bonesaw, who are technically my psychopomps. I did dream it, but sometimes I feel that it was always there, only waiting for me to bring it out. Of course, when I dream it’s only ever been one forest, not two. Truthfully, I never really noticed that the real, physical one and the one in my mind were slightly different until Opal pointed it out to me…”

Ronan turns abruptly and fixes Adam with the full intensity of his pale gaze.

“I think it followed you because you are like me,” he says intently. Adam is distantly conscious that he sounds excited about this, eager to get his theory into the open, to share it with Adam; Adam, who is feeling increasingly cold, despite the breezy summer warmth of the glade, “Not _like_ me, like me, but…also magic. A different sort of magic. Your _knack_ , your cards. I think perhaps it stayed by Henrietta to be close to you, and when you left – and came _here_ , as you say, of all places, which can’t possibly be a coincidence –“ he smiles suddenly, quick and sharp and shy, and gestures around them, turning a slow circle on his heel, “It followed you home.”

He looks so at ease here, loose-limbed and happy, head tilted back to feel the sun on his fair skin. At home in the forest. In _his_ forest. All his words have been spilled out onto the lush grass between them, and he has made his peace with them, while Adam…Adam can barely look at him.

Adam can hardly breathe.

The forest didn’t follow Adam because he’s ‘magic’. It followed him because he, imbecile child that he had been, cold and in pain and terrified out of his wits, had struck a bargain with it. It had, presumably, followed him to hold him to his word.

And it is _Ronan’s forest_. Not in the way Adam has always thought of it as ‘his’ forest, which is to say, a place where he has felt safe and known – and what a horrible joke that has now become – but literally. The forest _belongs_ to Ronan in the way that Opal or the dream junk cluttering the third floor belong to Ronan. It is _his_ , he dreamt it, it is _of him_ , an extension of his mind and body.

And Adam had pledged his eyes and his hands in its service.

Adam, who had believed himself to be moving ever closer to freedom had in fact only come full circle. He had escaped his father’s grip only to willingly submit himself to a softer leash. He belongs to the forest, and the forest is Ronan. He _belongs_ to _Ronan_. Nausea wells in him.

Ronan, who is watching him with a burgeoning frown. Something, he obviously can tell, is wrong, though he could not possibly know what.

“Adam?” he asks, softly, “I apologise. It is a lot to take in at once, I know. We ought to return to the house, you can have time to think it out.”

Adam says nothing. He is trying to re-learn how to open his mouth.

“Adam, I –” he sounds uncertain now, “Well, it’s just wood.” Ronan raps a knuckle against a tree trunk, “Truthfully, after Opal, I didn’t expect this to be… You seem quite shocked.”

“Yes.” Adam manages finally. His voice is stilted, thick, “I am quite…shocked.”

“Alright, well, come on, then. We’ll go back to the house. Have a drink, calm your nerves –”

“No!” that much at least is clear. Adam cannot go back to the warm comfort of Ronan’s study. He can’t go anywhere with – with Ronan – he can’t…

Ronan is looking at him with a bemused sort of frown, “Will you sleep here, then? I’ve done it on occasion. It’s actually quite comfortable –”

“Ronan, stop.”

Benign puzzlement is fast surrendering to concern, “Adam,” Ronan says, closing the distance between them, “What is it? What’s wrong?” he reaches up to touch his fingers to Adam’s cheek.

“ _Stop_!” Adam flings himself in the opposite direction. He can’t, he _can’t_. His heart feels sundered in his chest. He wraps his arms tight around his body, trying to hold it all in. He can feel Ronan’s eyes on his back.

“…Adam?” he sounds so terribly gentle and tentative, as he would be with a damaged bird. And Adam wants to go to him, to sooth him out of his uncertainty. Every fibre of his body wants it, and he plants his feet more firmly in the grass and hunches in on himself, waiting it out. “Adam, I don’t… _now_ what’s wrong?”

“I have to – I’m going back to the house,” he turns on his heel, flings his arm out behind him without looking when he hears Ronan’s step, “ _Don’t follow me_.” And then he stumbles forwards and, for the second time, careens through his night-dark forest. The last time he had run for his life, he had felt as though he ran towards safety. This time every step feels like something ripping from him, and he has never felt so bereft, so rudderless and broken and yet _sure_ , in his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You see, now, why I have to post the next chapter, just in case it's another week or so until I can get to AO3 again? I'm terrible at cliff-hangers anyway. I can't stand the tension (and I'm so sorry I left you with exactly that, all this time!).
> 
> ~  
> Next: loss and long journeys; doors closing and new windows revealed.


	18. and no net ensnares me.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Is this a new beginning? Are its linings silver? Can wonders grow in grief and betrayal? 
> 
> _At night, Adam lies awake shivering and listening to the roar of the trains and aches, thinking of his warm, silent room bathed in moonlight, of the sunlit schoolroom, the firelit library, Opal galloping up the stairs, Mrs Sargent sitting with him over tea in the rose garden. And Ronan. Ronan everywhere._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised, second chapter of the day. Enjoy.
> 
> PS: also for internet reasons, there will be a delay in answering comments. Please forgive me. I love them and have/will read them all, but web time is a little short just now. Thanks for your continued patience and support!

Adam is gone.

It is a cold, undeniable fact.

His bag is missing, and what meagre belongings he had: a few books (none from the library, of course, only things that Adam had brought with him when he came), his cards, and his wages from the locked box in his dresser drawer. That he has money with him is a slight comfort, at least, but small in the grander scheme.

Ronan feels…there are not words for what Ronan feels. Desperate. Enraged. Ravaged. Bereft. These words are hollow, pitiful echoes of what storms inside of him. When he had found his father dead on the front steps of this very house, his head split open like a melon and blood and brain matter sinking into the pale stone, he had felt a chasm open inside himself and Ronan had fallen into it willingly.

This is almost worse, because he can no longer afford that luxury.

Where can Adam have _gone_? And – God above – _why_? Gone like a thief, between one sunset and the dawn, and his room cleaned out and tidied as if he had never been there, his personal notes collected from the schoolroom. At first, Ronan had suspected kidnapping. Somehow, somebody had snuck into The Barnes and spirited Adam away. He had felt hot with rage and then cold with dread at the realisation that this must mean some enemy of his family had discovered their secret.

But there was no sign of a struggle, and when he found the money gone, and the cards, Ronan had known with all the certainty of a first-hand witness that Adam had not been coerced into going. He had left.

 _Adam had left him_.

Ronan sits on the heavy wing-backed chair in his study, sole survivor of his rampage only because it is too cumbersome for him to throw, too soft to satisfyingly tip over, and hangs his head between his knees, clutching at the back of his neck. His study is a ruin, which seems appropriate given the state of his heart. In his mind he goes over and over the evening before. Canoodling on the couch which now lies with legs in the air, spilling stuffing across the rug. Talking softly. The impromptu trek across the lawn and into the gentle darkness of the trees. Walking into the bright afternoon of Cabeswater, lush and green and welcoming, because it was _theirs_.

He had felt it in his bones the moment they entered the clearing. The trees welcomed Adam. They had been waiting for him, willing him to come home. Ronan didn’t fully understand their bond, yet, but he didn’t _need_ to understand to feel their joy in Adam’s presence, and the sense they had – that strange tree-sense, ancient and slow, which did not in fact belong to the physical trees at all but to the river of uncanny energies surging beneath them – that it was right for he and Ronan to be there, together in that sunlit glade.

Ronan had turned to him to explain, expecting Adam to feel it too, and share in his excitement. But Adam had looked…strange. Strained. Perhaps even from the moment he had set foot in the forest. Ronan realised now that though Opal was in and out of Cabeswater all the time, he had never seen Adam accompany her. Was he afraid of the trees? It seemed unlikely, given his own faculty for the supernatural, and the way he’d spoken of the forest at Henrietta when they’d shared dreams…

It was only when Ronan had begun to explain the truth, that both Henrietta’s forest and the one at The Barnes had come to be in the most unnatural way, that Parrish had begun to look truly ill. Ronan sunk his head into his hands. Adam’s _face_ when he had said ‘ _don’t follow me_ ’, nausea and fear warring in his wide eyes.

Adam had not looked that way even in his nightshirt and dressing-gown, brandishing a walking stick and facing down a living nightmare at Ronan’s side.

So it must have been – it had to be – something about _Ronan_ , in that moment, which had made Adam afraid. He wrapped his arms tight around his body, as Adam had in the forest, trying to hold it all in, trying not to fall apart. Sometimes, Ronan could not remember clearly the sound of his father’s laugh, or all the notes in his mother’s perfume. But he thought that he would recall, from now until the day he died, that moment when Adam – fearless, brilliant Adam – had looked at him with terror in his eyes.

Adam goes to London. Not from any particular desire to be _in London_ , which is filthy and loud and over-crowded with human life, but because, being those things, it is one of those places where it is easy to hide. And he is hiding. He is sure that Ronan will look for him, and he certainly has the money to hire the best. Adam has no doubt that they will trace him to London, and would likely trace him out of it again by any but the most Byzantine route. But within London itself things are much tricker to find. London is a city comprised of cracks as much as cobblestones. It will be easy to secrete himself into one while he tries to think what to do.

At night, curled in a tiny room by King’s Cross station which he shares with five other men, Adam lies awake shivering and listening to the roar of the trains and aches, thinking of his warm, silent room bathed in moonlight, of the sunlit schoolroom, the firelit library, Opal galloping up the stairs, Mrs Sargent sitting with him over tea in the rose garden. And Ronan. Ronan everywhere. In shirtsleeves, digging in the garden or wrangling a new horse with his stablemaster; stretched out on the window seat in the schoolroom, soaking in the sun like a cat; bent over his account books, pale skin warmed by the yellow lamp; in the drawing room, the music room, Adam’s room, Adam’s bed. Adam can’t escape him. Every part of Ronan hovers there, waiting for him, just behind his eyes, at every hour of the day or night. Adam thinks he sees him constantly in London’s ever-shifting crowds: a broad shoulder, a long leg, the rough stubble of a close-shaven scalp. London brings all sorts, and he sees pieces of Ronan everywhere.

It's like being stabbed in the gut, repeatedly. Adam feels breathless with pain. When he had read of broken hearts, he had not realised it was meant so literally; he knows now that something within him has been ruptured terribly and, in a cruel Promethean turn, grows back nightly only to be torn again with the return of consciousness.

The pain is lent a horrifying cast by his conviction that its root cause is not feeling but magic.

How many times had his eyes sought Ronan, instinctively, thoughtlessly, even across a crowded room? And, finding him, how often had his hands ached, as though brought in suddenly from the cold, to touch?

 _You can have my hands_ , he had told Cabeswater, with unpardonable carelessness, _You can have my eyes_. And Cabeswater took him at his word, for which it could not be blamed, and used his hands and eyes to reach towards its master.

Or was it worse than that? Had Ronan known, all along, the bargain Adam had struck with that piece of him left back in Henrietta? Had he used it to draw Adam to him, commanded his limbs consciously? Adam’s whole self rebels against this thought. Ronan is not cruel. He is not entitled in that way. He loves wild things, is happier to entice a free beast to him than to pet a tame one. He lets Bonesaw come and go as she likes, pleased each time she returns to him, feeds from his hand, chooses his shoulder over all other perches to alight upon. That Ronan might have knowingly used Adam’s bargain with Cabeswater to enchant him into his home and, thence, his bed, is not merely repugnant but absurd. Perhaps Adam is being naïve. Perhaps, even this far from Ronan and Cabeswater, he is still enthralled; but he cannot believe it. Whatever Ronan is, he is not capable of forcing another person against their will. At The Barnes even the horses are broken by kindness and affection, and allowed to keep their spirit intact.

It is Cabeswater which is the wildcard. Who knows what an entity like that might do to please its maker? Cabeswater, Adam is increasingly convinced, had used its influence to drive Adam gently and purposefully towards Ronan, and then done whatever seemed most expedient to keep him there. Love is certainly a very effective way to tether a human soul.

The problem with London is that he cannot really afford it. Ronan had been as generous with his wages as with everything else, and Adam is far from destitute, but that won’t last him long between the rooming house and meals and transport, and besides, his five roommates are wearing heavily on Adam’s nerves. Turnover is high, and Adam finds himself slipping back into a self he had thought he could leave behind forever, on high alert at every hour of the day, sleeping with one eye cracked, trying not to flinch at every touch or sudden sound. He must get out of the boarding house, must find a new position, a more permanent place to live.

And this time he must do it alone, without his cards, because he can no longer afford Cabeswater’s heady influence, turning him this way instead of that. The effort of keeping the forest’s gentle, insistent rustling locked up tight is an extra burden he must bear, just one more drain on his energy, one more reminder of everything he has lost.

So he stuffs his _tarot_ cards into the bottom of his bag and wanders London, heartbroken and homeless and quite probably bleeding internally, or so it feels. For the first time in almost three years Adam allows his baser instincts to take over; he has become soft, used to seeing the same roof over his head and drawing a steady wage. Now he must reach again for the hard, steadfast kernel of himself that had allowed him to survive his father and then climb, battered and undereducated and malnourished, from the bottom of the heap to become Top Boy in school.

Every morning he rises early, eats breakfast at the boarding house (not because it is good or particularly generous, but because it is hot, and included in his rent, and will carry him through until dinner time), and walks to St James’ Square and the London Library. He had felt an instinctive reluctance at voluntarily parting with the money for a subscription, but he needed a place to work, and access to all the regular newspapers, and it had been the logical solution. To his pleasure, Adam had quickly discovered that the library’s offerings extend far beyond a quiet table at which to read, and access to the classifieds. Its shelves are well-stocked, and though it could not ameliorate the pang he felt whenever he remembered, helplessly, the warmth and ease of his evenings in the library at The Barnes, it is a comfort to be able to immerse himself once more in his studies and ignore for a while the grimy, alien bustle outside.

He finds the job by accident.

Which is to say he gets a strong desire to pick up _this particular_ paper, then to flip to the advertisements, and then, as he runs a finger down the page, feels a prickle of _something_ as he brushes over a paragraph which reads: _Research assistant wanted. Oxford and London. Latin, Greek and scientific drawing. Room, board and wages provided_. He tries not to remember that the last time he experienced this same sequence of nudges and sensations it had led him to The Barnes. For a moment, Adam wonders if he ought to resist the pull. It could be intertwined with Cabeswater and its master. But it’s been months of unwashed bodies too close to him, of startling from sleep at the sound of drunken footsteps at his door, and of mounting anxiety about his financial situation; and although his bargain had seemed to strengthen his _knack_ , the talent itself predated it.

Besides, Adam has always, at his heart, been ruthlessly pragmatic even with himself. That is, after all, how he ended up in London in the first place.

When, on the Tuesday following, he rings the appointed doorbell at the appointed time, nobody answers. Adam is a little surprised. Usually, when his knack is involved, things proceed quite smoothly. He waits ten minutes and then, just as he is turning to go, a handsome cab roles to a stop and a square, good-looking young man tumbles out and up the stairs.

“God, sorry, I’m so sorry – Mr Parrish, isn’t it – please,” he gets the door open and holds it, giving Adam a brilliantly warm smile, “Do come in. Richard Gansey. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, alright, this one ends on a little bit of a cliff-edge, too, but it's a nice uplifiting one, to balance out all the angst. And, hopefully, I'll be back to fill in the next bit in a more timely fashion! 
> 
> If not, I hope you all stay well and safe, and I will see you asap.
> 
> Thank you, as ever, for reading. Please do let me know if you're enjoying the fic, I live for comments :)
> 
> ~  
> Next: everything is connected; there are no coincidences. New city, new friends, Adam reinvented.


End file.
